


xyz

by talkfast



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Amnesia, M/M, Magic-Users, Magical Lydia Martin, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Many other characters - Freeform, Werewolf Senses, Wolf Pack, but definitely fluff, kind of hurt/comfort?, not quite in character, stiles' life is pretty much a soap opera
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-29
Updated: 2016-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-10 05:51:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 21,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5573233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/talkfast/pseuds/talkfast
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After an accident in his final year of high school, Stiles suffers from amnesia. The pack chooses not to tell him about the supernatural activity in Beacon Hills. Years later, he returns home for a visit, hiding a secret of his own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. prologue: solve for [x]

There was something in the woods and all they had were theories. They gave it the alphabetical value of [x], being an unknown quantity that they had to solve for.

They didn’t have much to work with. [x] emanated [y], another unknown quantity: unnatural dark shadows reaching out from the point of origin to the very edges of the preserve. [y] was observable even on brightly sunny days, an undoubtedly supernatural phenomenon.

Scott had discovered [y] when he showed up for work at the clinic. He immediately called Stiles and described it as, “…just kind of there, dude. Not doing anything. It’s weird.”

Half an hour later, Stiles prodded the nearest shadow with the toe of his sneaker and felt…nothing. 

“Huh,” he said. His working theory was that darkness is the absence of light, which meant that [y] was a void which absorbed natural daylight as well as any artificial source they exposed it to.

An hour later, [y] had moved away from the clinic, playing across the trees. It had changed nothing. It had appeared to do nothing but…exist.

In a wide radius around [x], at the centre of the preserve, they identified three concentric circles: [y] was at the outermost circle, [z] in the middle, and [a] at the innermost circle.

Lydia had discovered [z] while documenting [y]’s patterns of movement. “I couldn’t hear anything,” she explained later. “I couldn’t smell anything, or taste anything. When I tried to speak, I could feel the vibrations of my vocal cords. I checked my pulse; it was regular. When I walked back a few feet, everything came back at once.”

Her experience made them wary of going deeper into the woods. It wasn’t until Stiles wandered further in, partly out of frustration at the lack of answers and partly out of scientific curiosity, that they learned about [a].

If he had to describe it, stepping into [a] was an absence of everything he had ever known. He could no longer touch, taste, see, hear or smell. [a] was a nearly complete void. The only thing left in it was a whisper—nothing solid or real, just an impression in the forefront of his mind that tugged him deeper, _deeper_ into the preserve, towards the unknown quantity that was [x]—though he could no longer perceive depth and struggled to define it.

What he said to the others was, “It felt like being unconscious.” _Like dreaming._

They had worked together for weeks when he finally figured it out.

_We were right. It’s a supernatural being,_ he texted Scott at the very last minute before he walked into the once-familiar, now shadowed depths of the preserve.

_It’s completely neutral. It doesn’t want anything, except for balance. Of the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ forces of the world, of past and future, so it can exist in the spaces left between._

_There must be an imbalance in Beacon Hills,_ he texted.

Then, finally: _I’m going to ask how we can fix it._

His cell phone started ringing but went silent when he stepped into [z]’s circle.

When he moved into the impossible void that was [a], he couldn’t feel his cell phone vibrating in his pocket anymore. It took conscious effort to remind himself that he had a cell phone—or a pocket, or a _body_ , for that matter.

Stiles would never be able to describe what [x] was like in close proximity. If he had to guess, it was a being that existed in more than three dimensions. All of his senses and possibly even time itself just _weren’t_ anymore, or at least didn’t manifest in recognisable ways. 

[x] did not speak English, because [x] did not speak. Still, it communicated that an exchange would have to be made for balance to be restored to Beacon Hills.

Maybe if he was conscious of his body, a panic attack would have threatened to overwhelm Stiles when he realised how significant an exchange would be necessary to satisfy [x]. The possibilities might have been physically staggering.

After thinking for what could have been milliseconds or millennia, Stiles made his offer: _[give me the power to save my friends and take my memories of them in exchange]_.

[x] accepted and so the story began.


	2. grocery shopping

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this story is finished so im posting it all at once, enjoy

When Scott’s worried voice through the phone tells him that his dad’s been hospitalised after an accident at work, Stiles thinks he can be forgiven for a few seconds of disbelief. Because:

a) His dad is _not_ the accident-prone member of their family. Stiles’ lifelong ability to hurl himself at the most inconvenient and painful piece of furniture in his immediate vicinity was inherited from his mom (along with his moles). Dad was always the one who caught them before they could do any serious damage. He has the patience of a saint and the grace of a ballet dancer, when needed.

b) John Stilinski never takes any unnecessary risks, which is what makes him a good sheriff.

c) Stiles has always known that his dad’s job is more dangerous than most. But still— _he broke his leg trying to hang Christmas lights above the station’s reception desk?_

“Are you kidding me?” he asks before it really hits him that _his dad is in hospital_ and _it’s at least a four hour drive back to Beacon Hills._

He manages to talk to his boss, get home in record time and throw everything he thinks he _might_ need for a month-long stay into a bag before Scott’s even finished explaining what happened. Honestly, he doesn’t need to hear more than the basic facts: Dad will be in hospital for the rest of the week under observation, then enforced bed rest for two weeks with regular check-ups, then relying on walking aids until the doctors give him the all-clear. Even once he’s allowed back at work, he’ll be shifting papers until the leg is fully healed.

“I can put him on the phone, if you want?” Scott offers hesitantly.

“Yes, Scott, I want,” he replies, pulling out of the parking lot. “I want to talk to my dad.”

The first thing that his dad says is, “Hello, son.” He sounds equal parts tired and amused, which only communicates that the injury wasn’t serious enough to warrant the _really strong_ painkillers.

“Christmas lights, _really?_ ” 

Dad chuckles, which is such a familiar sound that it calms him down. “Maggie’s wary of the stepladder and I thought I’d do a good deed on my way out of the office.”

“Maggie’s the sensible one in this scenario,” he tells him. “I’m on my way home now.”

There’s a long enough pause that Stiles glances at the cell phone resting near the gear stick, wondering if it’s switched off from being jolted by the car’s movements. 

“Home?” his dad asks, sounding uncertain. “To Beacon Hills?”

“Uh,” Stiles glances at the phone again before making a right turn. “Yes? Unless you’ve moved without telling me?”

There’s another strangely long pause...and possibly some whispering from the other end?

“Dad...?”

“How long are you planning to stay, son?” his dad asks in a weirdly cheerful voice.

“I took four weeks, and Vanessa said it would be okay if I needed more time to make sure you’re getting better.”

“Can they spare you that long? We’re coming up to holiday season.”

“No kidding, Mr Hospitalised-for-too-much-Christmas-spirit,” he replies drily. “That's why I didn't make it home over break last year, but this year we’ve got a couple of trainees and Vanessa owes me time off after covering for her during Samhain.”

God, that had been a coffee-fuelled haze of customers asking for incense and non-native herbs in various stages of naked. Pagan celebrations meant a lot of business for Vanessa’s occult supply store, but customers ranged from ‘trying to return a half-burned candle because it failed to summon the intended spirit’ to ‘do you sell dream catchers here?’.

“You know I’d love to see you, Stiles, but it really isn’t necessary-”

“I can and will hang up the phone,” he says firmly. “In fact, I’m driving right now and shouldn’t be distracted. Look, I’ll get there at around eight o’clock. I’ve still got a house key, so I’ll stay there tonight, get some grocery shopping done and whatever. Is there anything you need?”

After another pause: “No. Thanks, kiddo. Make sure to wake me up if I’m asleep when you get here.”

He has never been brave enough to risk Melissa McCall’s ire, so all that he says is, “I’ll see you soon,” which seems to satisfy his dad.

The drive itself is pretty uneventful. He’s always had trouble concentrating on anything for more than a couple of minutes at a time (except when he fixates on something and spends hours or days trying to figure out exactly how it works) but driving is firmly in the part of his brain labelled ‘habit’, along with shaving and closing up the store.

While the car is stopped at a gas station, Stiles checks what he had hurriedly crammed into the bag resting on the passenger seat. “Black salt, dried lavender, acacia leaves, essence of marjoram, wolf’s heart, mountain ash…” he murmurs, then kneels down to check the engraved rune near the car’s engine.

Protective runes are incredibly useful but he hasn’t learned more than the basics from Vanessa, choosing to specialise in another area of magic.

It’s dark overhead when he’s finally greeted by the _Welcome to Beacon Hills_ sign. 

Melissa tells him that it would be better to visit in the morning, once his dad has rested. So after checking the fridge (abysmally low in what Stiles would consider healthy foods, but at least the spread is low-fat) he heads over to the 24/7 grocery store.

He loves cooking because it’s productive. Or maybe he loves it because of some genetic predisposition. Mom was always in the kitchen whenever he got home from school.

Maybe he loves it because it’s similar to magical rituals, following instructions carefully but adding your own individual flair to make it work, make it _yours_. Who knows, really? If he hadn’t discovered his magical ability, maybe he would have hated cooking with a passion.

Stiles is musing on this topic while he loads up a cart with fresh ingredients that he could bake into a casserole, or savoury muffins. His co-worker Alfarid whipped up muffins with immune boosting properties last flu season, so maybe he should call and ask for a recipe...?

“Are you talking to yourself?” Scott’s amused voice calls from the end of the aisle.

“If you tell anyone, I’m not making you voodoo muffins,” Stiles threatens. He’s so happy to see Scott that he’s seriously considering breaking the Bro Code and going in for a hug.

Scott hugs him first, which is reason #19282384 why he loves Scott. “Voodoo muffins?” he asks, confused.

“I’m not sure that I have all the ingredients, so we’ll stick with oatmeal for now.” He pushes the cart further up the aisle, waving away Scott’s offers of help. “You saw my dad today, right? How did he look?”

“Tired,” Scott answers honestly.

“He mentioned that it had been a rough week. Something about a territory dispute?”

Scott gives him a sharp glance, then visibly relaxes. “Oh, yeah. Wild animals have been travelling through the woods around Beacon Hills because of the colder weather. We’re worried that they’re a danger to local residents, but we can’t do anything about it right now because the next town over claims that they’re…pets. It becomes a question of whether or not they’re subject to Beacon Hills police department’s jurisdiction, or still come under the other town’s.”

That’s not the exciting police action that Stiles was hoping for. “Sounds like a headache,” he murmurs, inspecting labels to figure out where the pots of honey were sourced from.

“It is,” Scott confirms. As a veterinary assistant, he’s been working with the police department to identify the animals that sometimes foray into Beacon Hills. Something something animal attacks, something something mountain lions.

“Be careful if you’re ever out at the preserve after dark, and make sure to keep your cell phone with you.”

Stiles glances at him. “I was planning on visiting Mom at the cemetery.”

Scott nods, not surprised. “That should be fine. The animals don’t like to wander too close to the heavily trafficked areas. Just…tell someone where you’re going, okay?”

His best friend knows better than to tell him to stay out of the preserve full stop. Still, the situation sounds more serious than either Scott or his dad had communicated over Skype.

_Dried lavender for protection,_ he thinks, putting a pot of honey in the cart. _Black salt for purification…not much use against hungry mountain lions…_

“Hey, could you get me a couple of bottles of soda?” he asks Scott distractedly.

In the cooking ingredients section, he murmurs to himself, “Bay leaves—bay laurel.” Great for seasoning roast beef and warding off unwanted influence. “Ground ginger…no, it’s better fresh…” Added to tea or a herbal tincture, ginger improves likelihood of success.

Rosemary (for peace and tranquillity) goes into the cart without a second thought, along with sage (used in purification rites and to improve communication) and rose essence (increases the strength of a positive or negative reaction).

When Scott returns with the requested bottles of soda, he mentions, “Mom figured you could have dinner with us, at least until your dad is discharged from the hospital.”

“Yeah?” Stiles is finally satisfied with the assortment of makeshift magical ingredients and trying not to think about how he could have bought them in better condition and more cheaply at Vanessa’s store, so he pushes the cart into the next aisle.

“Remember Derek Hale? You met him a few years ago.”

“After the accident,” he replies.

“Yeah,” says Scott in that weird, quiet voice people always use when they talk about the accident.

A couple of months before graduation (because he’s always had the worst timing) he’d woken up in a hospital room crowded with people he didn’t recognise. His memories are pretty hazy and sometimes he wonders if he’s long confused them with his dreams. Scott had been there, of course—and Melissa, who worked at the hospital anyway—at some point his dad walked through the door and near-collapsed into the chair at his bedside. 

But there was also Lydia Martin, his first love and goddess confined to this mortal plane—and Derek Hale, lone survivor of the house fire he thought had moved away from town years ago—Danny Mahealani, who was way too popular to be spending a Friday night at the hospital bed of someone he barely knew—and other faceless, nameless people he didn’t recognise. They’d all looked worried when he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten into the accident.

When the doctor diagnosed him with ‘selective amnesia’, there had been a few hallway conferences before they filled in the blanks: Stiles had been in a car accident near the preserve, sustaining a head injury that scarred the base of his skull. Now that his hair has grown longer, you mostly can’t see the scarring until you move it out of the way.

Good Samaritan Derek Hale saw the accident and parked his car, blocking off the road until the ambulance could arrive.

The thing is, he can’t imagine the guy who was there when he first woke up holding his limp hand at the side of the road and desperately calling 911. It’s hard to imagine leather-jacket-wearing, perpetually-frowning Derek Hale travelling with him in the ambulance and waiting the few hours before he regained consciousness to make sure that he was okay.

Hanging around Stiles’ hospital bed must have been a bonding experience for Scott and Derek, because they started just…hanging out. Case in point: 

“Derek comes over for dinner a couple of times a week. He’s…not great at cooking.” Scott (who once ate earthworms covered in soy sauce on a dare without complaining) winces, so Stiles mentally upgrades that from ‘not great’ to ‘possibly lethal, avoid at any and all cost’.

“If you’re not comfortable with that, I can let him know-”

Stiles abruptly puts up a hand to stop him. “I’m not going to deprive anyone of the joy that is your mom’s cooking. Don’t worry about it.”

Scott smiles gratefully and asks, “Do you want help carrying all of this out to your car?”

Once all the groceries have made it safely into the kitchen, his mind buzzes with the hundreds of things that he can think to do: upgrade the runes etched into the house’s foundations last year, start working on talismans for protection and luck, get a head start on making enough baked goods to feed the entire town…

Instead, Stiles finds a handheld mirror and stands in the bathroom, pushing up his hair and angling the mirror so he can see the network of scars that had cost him memories. If he considers it from _this_ angle, it almost looks like the rune for prosperity…from _that_ angle, it reminds him of the rune for loss, like the two are overlaid, with more complicated, messy scar lines for good measure. 

For him, the accident is little more than a story that he tells sometimes as an ice breaker. But when Scott talks about it like he’s apologising, it makes Stiles feel there’s an indistinct difference between Beacon Hills before the accident and everything that came after.


	3. dinner invitation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: description of a panic attack

_Ring! Ring! Ring!_

“Wha-” He jerks awake, looking around his bed confusedly. “Shit!” he swears, leaning over to silence the ancient alarm clock left hidden in his top drawer (because past Stiles was an asshole who needed to trick his brain into getting up early for school). “Fuck—ow!” he grunts, knocking his leg into the side table, then managing to get tangled up in his sheets and fall before he could reach far enough to _turn…the damn…thing…off!_

So his first day back at Beacon Hills begins absurdly early, with Stiles debating the merits of falling asleep where he’s now lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling and pressing down relentlessly on the ‘snooze’ button.

High School Student Stiles was definitely made of sterner stuff than College Student Stiles, who hasn’t been awake this early since that first week of term when he tried to attend all of his lectures (a resolution which failed him by week two, after a new Marvel series appeared on Netflix).

Two cups of coffee and a brisk shower later, Stiles works on basic talismans with the ingredients scattered across the kitchen table. He has limited knowledge of talismans, mainly learned from his co-workers in their free time. The idea is straightforward: amplify the innate magical properties of the ingredients with an exertion of magical will. Make sure they work harmoniously together as you bind them into a small bundle, tied with…whatever you can find, really. The packaging doesn’t matter as much as the talisman’s contents.

Vanessa would probably fire him if she knew that he was using dental floss to hold the bundles together, but all Stiles cares about is preventing them from loosening and spilling herbs and dried flowers everywhere.

The resulting talismans smell like a weird, off-putting mixture of sweet flowers, spices and mint. More importantly, they’re the real life equivalent of Harry Potter’s Liquid Luck potion. They’ll ward off malevolence and bring good fortune to the people who carry them around.

He rewards himself with another cup of coffee and gets ready for the drive to the hospital.

His dad has always been a morning person and he’s already sitting up, huge cast propped up further down the bed, glasses resting on his nose as he does a crossword puzzle.

“Were they at least multi-coloured Christmas lights?”

“Red and green,” his dad confirms, a slow grin spreading across his face. “Flashing, too.”

“I guess that’s okay, then,” he allows. 

Sitting next to the bed, Stiles takes in the familiar and unfamiliar details of his dad’s face. There are new worry lines at his forehead and deep shadows underneath his eyes. When he moves to take off the reading glasses and place them on the side table, his motions communicate fatigue, as if he hadn’t been sleeping well even before the accident. Stiles can’t help but wonder if that’s the reason why his usually cautious, well-coordinated dad managed to fall while standing on a stepladder.

“What have you brought with you?” his dad asks.

“Christmas has come early,” he tells him dramatically, unzipping the bag and pulling items out of it. “I brought...that old sweater that you like,” a worn, blue number that he’s still not sure whether his mom knitted herself or bought from a store, “…books from your bedside table…a Sharpie—that’s more for me, so I can draw awesome pictures on your cast,” he explains, “…a couple of photos, and, uh…a good luck charm that I made.”

Stiles swings the talisman like a pendulum, back and forth. “Trust me. Keep it in your pocket, your wardrobe, your bedside drawer and it’ll bring you luck.”

“That’s…creative,” his dad says diplomatically.

“You’ll like these better, I think.” The Tupperware container is unwieldy, because he’d made more than a dozen muffins in anticipation of his dad readily sharing them with hospital staff and any future visitors. When he opens the lid, a delicious scent wafts out.

“Blueberry?” his dad asks, sounding hopeful.

“Cinnamon apple,” he says, gesturing at the muffins lining one side of the container, “and honey oatmeal. I can bring blueberry muffins for you later in the week. If you have any requests, better make 'em now!”

He takes advantage of his dad’s brief distraction, tucking the talisman into the top drawer of the bedside table along with a couple of the books.

They pass a pleasant hour eating muffins, discussing how painful the leg injury has been, and watching reruns of Judge Judy on the small hospital television. 

Even though he worries about his dad’s recovery, it never borders on outright panic. Probably because the cast is a visual reminder that he’s not here for the same reason Mom was, that there’s no reason he won’t get better in the next few weeks.

Still, as he leaves the hospital ward there are a couple of minutes triggered by…by the noxious disinfectant smell, or a doctor’s clean white robes, or the paintings that are still hanging in the waiting rooms, _he doesn’t know…_ a couple of terrible minutes where he stands rigidly still, feeling light-headed, as an _overwhelming_ and _irrational fear_ crests over him, as if _his body is meaningless_ and _he’s adrift in abject terror-_

Distantly, he recognises the pressure of hands on both shoulders. Standing in front of him- 

“You’re okay, I promise. Stiles, you need to calm down. Everything’s okay.”

-a face he recognises, a low, murmuring voice that isn’t so familiar. The hands on his shoulders feel like they’re pressing him down to the ground, protecting him now that gravity isn’t working the way it should. At some point, he started nodding.

“You know how this works. Breathe in…now, out. Stiles. Just concentrate on your breathing.”

And he does, slowly coming back to himself. His heart is thudding painfully in his ears and that might be enough to send him spiralling into panic again, were it not for Derek Hale standing a foot away from him, pressing firmly down on his shoulders.They’re standing in a hallway of the hospital, a couple of nurses passing by glancing at them to make sure everything’s under control.

He breathes in and out, shallowly. “Ah…fuck,” he chokes out. Unconsciously, his hands had reached up to clamp around Derek’s wrists. “Sorry, I’m sorry-”

“You didn’t do anything wrong, Stiles. Take another deep breath. Were you heading out to the parking lot?” When he nods jerkily, Derek takes a careful step back without moving his hands away. “Is it okay if I walk there with you?”

“Yeah, I- I’m sorry. Can you carry my…my stuff?”

Derek slings the bag over his shoulder and gently grasps Stiles’ elbow, guiding him toward the elevators. He would maybe feel worse about being treated like a child if he wasn’t so, _so_ fucking grateful for the distraction from… _whatever it was_ about the hospital today that threw him back in time to the moment when the machines in his mom’s room started beeping violently and the nurses had been shouting and then… _everything else._

He’s still teetering on the brink of another minor breakdown, so he doesn’t say anything when Derek presses the elevator button and they walk out the hospital doors together.

It’s easier to breathe in the fresh air outside. After a moment of apparent indecision, Derek tugs him over to his car, a sleek black Camaro that doesn’t look a day older than it did when Stiles moved out and went to college. He opens the doors, winds down the windows, and sits in the driver’s seat. Without thinking too much about it—not sure that he’s capable of thinking about much right now, anyway—Stiles takes the passenger seat.

What he’s always noticed about Derek Hale is that the guy doesn’t seem to have a wide range of emotional expressions. His jaw is perpetually clenched and his shoulders are always stiff underneath the t-shirts in predictable shades of black or navy blue. He exudes agitation, like everything around him conspires to be annoying.

Right now, Derek’s shifting in his seat like it’s difficult to remain still. He leans forward, clenching his fingers around the steering wheel hard enough to whiten the skin at his knuckles, then he releases it, fidgeting with the zipper of his (leather, of course it’s leather) jacket. He doesn’t ever glance at Stiles, instead looking out at the side mirror.

When Stiles has calmed down enough that his heart beat is only a little too fast, and he’s wondering whether that’s a rune scratched into the dashboard or just an unfortunate act of vandalism, he says, “Um, are you okay?”

For the first time since they walked out of the hospital, Derek looks at him.

His eyes remind him of the woods, an earthy brown mixed with the colour of leaves in the sunlight. Stiles mentally files that thought away in a section of his mind that has long been titled ‘evidence that I am definitely 100% bisexual’.

“I, uh…” Stiles clears his throat, sitting up straighter. Which makes him realise that apparently he was zoned out enough to fasten the seatbelt? “Thanks for helping me get out of there. I was visiting my dad and I guess…”

“Stiles,” says Derek. “You don’t have to explain what happened.”

After a second he replies, “Okay? Okay. Well… I really want to say thank you. Because it’s…yeah. And I’m sorry. You were probably visiting someone too, right?”

With trademark clenched jaw and stiff shoulders, Derek glances up at the hospital building through the car window. “No. I was dropping something off for Mrs McCall.”

Stiles blinks. “Oh. That’s… Are you going to have dinner at the McCalls’ tonight?”

“Would you rather I didn’t?”

“Wow, dude. I really don’t have an opinion either way,” he says defensively. “I mean…I guess it would be cool if I could…bring something along to thank you for today. Do you have any favourite foods?”

Derek considers this for long enough that Stiles is calculating the logistics of grabbing his bag, undoing the seatbelt and exiting the car with still-shaking limbs. “Lemon meringue,” he says finally. “But you don’t have to thank me for anything.”

“I’m pretty sure I never thanked you for getting me to the hospital a couple of years ago. That, plus today, works out to about three lemon meringue pies by my reckoning.” He finally feels solid enough to reach into the back seat for his bag, though his fingers are almost imperceptibly trembling.

“I can give you a ride home,” Derek says suddenly.

“My car-” he tries to protest, already knowing he’s in no good condition to drive.

“If you’re at the McCalls’ for dinner, I can bring you back here afterwards to pick it up.”

Stiles hums, settling more comfortably into the seat. “Four lemon meringue pies.”

He revises his theory that Derek Hale doesn’t have a wide range of emotions when, while starting up the engine and glancing at the side mirror before reversing, his mouth turns up in something that resembles an unpractised smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i also make a mental note of every new piece of evidence that im not straight


	4. let's be honest

Several things become clear within minutes of stepping through the McCalls’ front door:

1\. Derek either hasn’t told Scott and Melissa about his episode at the hospital, or they’ve become much, much better liars (unlikely).

2\. Even though he’s been friends with her son for years now, Derek still dresses up for dinner with ‘Mrs McCall’. He’s changed the dark blue t-shirt and leather jacket for a slightly neater long-sleeved black shirt—though Stiles had noticed the leather jacket folded up in the Camaro when he was walking up the drive, so maybe it’s more of a comfort thing?

3\. Melissa looks tired the same way his dad did, as if she hasn’t been sleeping well. Possibly because she’s a nurse and used to getting irregular sleep, her eyes are bright as ever, despite the shadows underneath them. Though her movements are slower, they’re still self-assured. She waves away his offer to help with dinner preparations.

4\. There’s a talisman disguised as a bowl of dried flower petals on the living room table.

“Do you like it? It’s rose potpourri,” Melissa says, smiling as she sets down plates of food.

“It’s nice,” he replies blandly. Trailing his finger along the edge of the wooden bowl (he thinks it’s made of pine wood, which has magical properties that he can’t remember), he feels that there is a symbol carved into it. “Where did you get it from?”

“Oh, you went to high school with her. Lydia gave it to me last Christmas.”

“Lydia?” he says, startled. “Lydia Martin? _The_ Lydia Martin?”

“ _The_ Lydia that you had a crush on from the time you were four years old, yes.” Melissa gives him a _look_ which effectively communicates that she wants to hear how wonderful he thinks Lydia is about as much as she did years ago (which is, not at all).

Stiles starts to turn the bowl around, so he can look at the carved symbol. Then he notices Derek staring at him from across the table. _Eyes like the woods,_ he thinks, blinking and quickly turning his attention back to the talisman itself.

Although talismans can be useful, just like runes, he hasn’t bothered to learn much about them. In their more advanced forms they’re too precise to hold his interest. All he can tell about this one is that it's made up entirely of rose petals soaked in…possibly, jasmine oil? 

Rose, at its essence, increases the strength of a positive or negative reaction. Which means that the talisman is designed to significantly multiply the effect of one of its ingredients.

Hiding his cell phone underneath the table, he sends a quick text to Vanessa:

_talisman made of rose petals with jasmine (?) oil = ?_

She responds quickly:

_Jasmine oil with rose petals is an aphrodisiac. I thought you went home because your father was in hospital???_

_not jasmine oil then – lilac?_

_Lilac oil with rose petals has no effect. Want to take another stab in the dark? LOL_

Melissa gives him a stern enough look when she sits down that he reflexively feels guilty, switching his phone to silent and putting it away.

“I heard from the nurses at station four that you visited your dad today?” she asks, passing a bowl of mashed potato across the table to Scott.

It’s an innocent enough question that reminds him of what happened afterward. Despite himself, he can’t help but glance at Derek, whose expression is impassive. “Yeah,” he says, shovelling assorted vegetables into his mouth. “He seemed to be taking it okay.”

She laughs at that and says wryly, “If I know your dad at all, tomorrow morning he’ll be climbing the walls and trying to persuade nurses to discharge him early.” When the food on her plate is arranged to her satisfaction, she tells him more seriously, “It was sweet of you to come at such short notice, Stiles. I know your dad really appreciates it.”

He chews carefully and then swallows the mouthful. “Yeah. I really should have planned to come back for the break this year.” It grates against his conscience that it took his dad getting hospitalised for him to return to Beacon Hills. “It’s just that work-” 

Work is kind of _overwhelming_ in a way that he can’t convincingly explain without admitting that magic is 100% real and also that by magic user’s standards, he’s pretty powerful. He thrives on customer’s requests because more often than not they’re _interesting_ and _challenging._ Alfarid can’t go a week without setting a fire in the store and Vanessa refuses to accept that astrology has no legitimate magical basis, always reading his horoscope when he comes into work. 

He loves messing with the sceptics who come in to prove their assumptions right, loves that people buy the good luck charm bracelets just because they’re pretty, loves that his magic is responsive and _useful_ in a way that, let’s be honest, his History degree probably won’t be.

Melissa waves her hand, interrupting him. “Are you still working at the supply store?”

“Yeah.”

“What it’s like for you, working there?”

“Great,” he tells her honestly. “It’s really great.”

She gives that slightly tired but still bright and brilliant smile. “I’m glad to hear that.”

It’s hard not to notice that throughout the meal, Scott and Derek communicate with each other in monosyllables and pointed looks. When Scott kicks him under the table, hard enough to leave a bruise, his fork clatters against the plate and he turns to him, betrayed.

“Sorry!” he says immediately, guilt written all over his face. “That wasn’t-” He goes quiet abruptly instead of explaining _why_ he tried to violently kick Derek Hale, who by all appearances has been a substitute best friend since Stiles left for college.

Meanwhile, Derek is silently eating roast beef. In between bites he makes eye contact with Stiles and _then holds it,_ for possibly the most torturous few seconds of Stiles’ adult life.

There’s no way he can know that Stiles’ heart beat immediately doubles in speed, thank god. Their weird staring competition in the middle of dinner is interrupted when Scott elbows him viciously in the side. “Ow, dude! Is it necessary to have all that muscle mass for veterinary work?” he complains, rubbing uselessly at his sore rib.

Once the meal is finished, he offers to help serve dessert. The lemon meringue came out slightly misshapen because he had to walk the short distance from his dad’s house to the McCalls’, but he doesn’t figure Derek is the kind of person to care about that.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think that you asked Derek what his favourite dessert is.” Melissa leans against the bench with her arms folded.

“Hopefully Scott also knows better, otherwise he’ll be hurt that I didn’t bring chocolate brownies,” he jokes. “I ran into him at the hospital today. He did me a favour.” Belatedly, he realises, “But the nurses at section four probably told you about that, too.”

For a few moments, they just look at each other. Then she unfolds her arms and takes a can of whipped cream out of the fridge, setting it on the bench next to him. “We don’t have to talk about this,” she tells him quietly. “But if you ever want to, I’m always here to listen.”

“Thanks,” he says past a throat that’s suddenly dry. He never wanted his…hurt to become someone else’s burden but this is _Melissa,_ who was never his mom but came the closest, a person he knows and trusts and believes cares about him no matter what.

Melissa piles up the whipped cream on Scott’s plate as pseudo-punishment for accidentally kicking their guest underneath the table earlier, until the white goo is steadily melting into a white goo lake, soaking into the pie crust until it’s a soggy mess.

“Give Derek the biggest slice,” she tells him with a wink. “He doesn’t like to ask for seconds.”

When dessert has been served, he’s laughing so hard at Scott’s expression that he almost misses something _important._ Inwardly, he thanks whatever impulse caused him to look over at Derek at just that moment, when the evening light brightened the colour of his eyes, made his mouth and jaw appear softer, more relaxed. 

The tension is gone from his shoulders as he looks down at the dessert with an emotion on his face that Stiles isn’t arrogant enough to call awe. Affection, maybe, for whoever made it for him well enough for lemon meringue pie to become his favourite. Sadness, possibly, for the people he loved who are now lost.

It seems inevitable that he would look up at that moment, at Stiles. Just a couple of seconds, measured by thudding, too-loud heart beats. Long enough for Stiles to realise that he thinks Derek Hale is _beautiful,_ which is too big a revelation to file away and examine later.

_Oh, shit,_ he thinks long after the moment has passed. His heart beat doesn’t really slow down until he’s in the kitchen scrubbing at the dirty dishes, despite Melissa’s protests. With the soap suds halfway up his arms, he thinks again, _Oh, shit._

He tries desperately not to name the feeling that had spread out from his chest, along his arms, to his fingers which ached to touch—like warmth or a mild electric shock, or _magic._

“I’m parked outside-”

“Shit!” Stiles jumps, managing to splash warm, soapy water down his shirt.

Derek is standing in the kitchen with him, probably thinking that Stiles is too clumsy to keep dishwater in the sink, but not saying anything about it. He just stands there with his hands in the pockets of jeans, watching him try to keep a stack of dishes from falling over.

“I didn’t hear you come in,” he tells him, heart beating fast because it’s a _traitor._

It turns out that Derek is even more expressive than he gave him credit, because when he glances over his partially-sodden shoulder, both of his eyebrows are raised.

“I’m parked outside,” he repeats and gestures in the vague direction of his car. “I can drive you to the hospital whenever you’re ready to go.”

Frustrated with himself and with the world in general, Stiles sighs. “I think I’ll have to borrow a shirt from Scott. Is it okay for you to wait that long? I mean, he can probably-”

“It’s fine, Stiles.”

“Thanks.” He attempts a smile over his shoulder and goes back to washing the dishes.

Derek startles him for the second time in as many minutes by asking, “Do you need any help?” after Stiles had mistakenly assumed that he’d left the kitchen.

His heart is beating _so ridiculously fast_ that he takes off a plastic glove and presses his palm to his chest, as if that would do anything other than more thoroughly soak the thin material of his t-shirt.

The situation gets even worse when Derek stands next to him, preparing to dry the dishes. He’s close enough that Stiles can feel _waves_ of heat coming off his body, close enough that there’s the woodsy scent of his cologne (sandalwood, used for purification and protection).

“Are you okay?” Derek asks softly, sounding concerned.

“Yeah, I just…” he struggles for a justification for his weird behaviour, “…do you have any idea what’s in the, uh, potpourri? Rose petals, right? And-”

“Violet oil.”

It’s probably just his imagination that Derek stands closer than necessary to reach the dishes ready for drying, his shoulder seeming to nudge against Stiles’ every now and then. His overactive imagination has rarely done him any favours, after all.

Upstairs, he exchanges a promise to make chocolate brownies for an old t-shirt (which had pretty much been shared between them during high school, travelling between their houses without either of them acknowledging it).

To distract himself from the impossible reality that is Derek Hale _sitting right there,_ he reaches out and traces his fingertips along the curved lines of what he thinks might be a badly drawn rune for guidance—a magical GPS, making sure that Derek is always driving in the right direction. He wonders if Lydia drew this rune, just like she made the talisman for the McCalls.

Then Stiles remembers that he has new information and sends another text to Vanessa:

_violet?_

Within minutes she replies, to his dismay:

_Violet oil with rose petals is a powerful ward against deception, encourages honesty. That is, IF you guessed the right oil this time._

He doesn’t quite have the willpower to stop himself from staring at Derek, who’s been happy enough to drive without talking. More than a deterrent against lying, the talisman strongly encourages honesty. Which means that-

Derek glances over at him, mouth briefly turning up at the corners, _and he looks-_

_Oh, shit,_ he thinks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> reasons why i like lists:  
> \- theyre easy to write  
> \- i just think theyre neat


	5. q & a

Beacon Hills Cemetery is close enough to the preserve that he’d be surprised they haven’t closed the gates in an attempt to keep out wild animals, if he didn’t recognise the markings at each corner of the brick fence that surrounds the grave sites.

He kneels down and presses his thumb to a sophisticated rune for protection and secrecy, which would undoubtedly make the cemetery difficult to find unless you already knew where it was. If Lydia Martin is the same magic practitioner who carved the rune into Derek’s dashboard, made the talisman that she gifted to Melissa, and defended this land against animal incursion, then she’s clearly practised and significantly improved her skills.

Following the fence that shields mourners from curious eyes, Stiles notices plants that have been cultivated too deliberately to have a non-magical purpose—sage, basil, ague weed and crawling ivy all fortify the runic protections.

Though he’s satisfied that the cemetery is magically protected, many of the ingredients that he had hoped to find naturally growing here will have to be taken from his limited supplies.

Stiles breathes in deeply, then breathes out. His hands are trembling as he walks back across the cemetery, heading towards a familiar gravestone—his mother’s gravestone.

Suddenly, he notices that stones here are newer and don’t have a plot of land between them and the narrow path. They’re memorial stones, he realises. The bodies weren’t recovered and the people the stones are dedicated to have been presumed dead.

“‘Erica Reyes’,” he reads out, crouching down beside a memorial stone. “Erica?” He remembers a girl at Beacon Hills High School, who suffered from a medical condition that kept her in hospital six months out of the year. She had complimented him whenever he wore a Batman t-shirt and once gave him her pen when he took his apart in class and couldn’t quite figure out how to put it back together. 

He’d gotten a B- on that test. Even though he’d wanted to tell her about it and return the pen, she’d been hospitalised again, and after that he’d sort of…well, past Stiles was kind of an asshole. He’d forgotten all about it.

_Erica Reyes_  
_1993-2010_  
_Not many people get to write their own epitaph, right?_  
_Well, suckers. Only my parents get to know my middle name._

Beside her memorial stone is another that looks similar enough to have been made at the same time:

_Vernon Jonas Boyd  
1993-2010  
Death is only a shadow across the path to Heaven_

He has vague memories of a quiet kid who always sat at the back of the classroom, and was never really bullied because he didn’t react enough for the bullies to enjoy it.

“Seventeen years old,” he mutters, touching the numbers as if they might change, make the deaths of people he was supposed to have grown up with any easier to accept. They had all gone to high school together. It should have been just the beginning of their lives.

Stiles sits on the ground facing the memorial stones, moonlight lengthening their shadows. There’s no question about what he should do next but he still has to work up the courage.

Runes and talismans never appealed to him because they’re too precise. Herb lore, used in potion brewing and cooking, is more interesting but didn’t manage to catch his attention the way _this_ did, the area of magic that he has chosen to specialise in.

He could draw a basic sigil if he was blindfolded, had his hands tied behind his back and was forced to hold the implement between his teeth. This particular design has been perfected over time, as his knowledge and skills have improved.

Stiles uses a capped ballpoint pen (not as dramatic as a silver knife, maybe, but just as effective) to draw a circle in the dirt, large enough for two people to comfortably stand in. He overlays the circle with sweeping lines reminiscent of the runes for life and death. They’re fluid, not constructed based on an inalterable formula like actual runes are.

At each point where the lines intersect, he partially buries a small token—old coins, sprigs of rosemary (for peace and tranquillity), a stick of sage (for purification), smooth stones that are centuries older than he ever will be, a shard of glass that threatens to cut his fingers—he picks and chooses from his bag of magical ingredients, based on what _feels_ right, which elements will balance out the other tokens that decorate the sigil.

By the time it’s finished, Erica’s sigil is sharp glass and glossy stone, glinting coins and nondescript pieces of metal. Stiles grins down at his handiwork, beginning to feel the exhilarating crackle of magic like an electrical current starting at his fingertips.

All the ritual needs now is an exertion of magical will. He stands at the centre of the sigil and focuses on the snap of magic travelling through his fingers up to his wrists, coiling around them. It hardly takes effort at all to command the sigil to function like a beacon, calling Erica’s spirit to it. The more difficult part is maintaining that outpouring of will long enough for her to respond and during their interactions.

An unwilling spirit can resist the sigil if they’re strong enough. Erica comes willingly and her arrival is marked by the tokens rising rapidly up into the air. Though her form is transparent, a physically solid coin rests in the middle of both palms, moving as she does—a shard of glass settles in her skull; stones mark her heart and lower down, both lungs.

She doesn’t look like the Erica that he remembers from high school. Her hair is long and thick, curving around her face to highlight clear skin and smiling lips. “Hello, Batman,” she says in greeting, bouncing almost imperceptibly on the balls of her incorporeal feet.

“Does that make you Robin?” he replies, grinning at the sight of her.

“Catwoman.” She flicks that glorious hair back over her shoulder. “Obviously.” For some reason, her smile falters until it has completely disappeared. Erica leans forward, close enough to brush ghostly fingers along the collar of his jacket, pretending to straighten it so convincingly that for a moment he thinks that the jacket is pulled tighter across his chest. “What happened to you, Stiles?” she asks with narrowed eyes. “You’re acting strangely.”

“ _I’m_ acting strangely? Erica, the last time I saw you was…eight years ago? You gave me a pen for a test and then you were in hospital again and-”

“You could have visited me in hospital, you know,” Erica says softly.

“I know,” he tells her, though fifteen-year-old Stiles hadn’t realised just how much she had probably been going through. “I know that now. I’m sorry that I was-”

“-kind of an asshole?” she finishes delightedly, a smile quirking at her lips. “Apology accepted. Even though you’re about five years too late.” Erica glances down at her memorial stone and then at Vernon Boyd’s, sad eyes lingering on it much longer.

“You died at the same time,” he remarks, being careful not to phrase it as a question. 

There are three crucial stages to communicating with the spirit of a deceased person.

Stage 1: Creating a sigil that serves the purposes of calling the spirit and containing it safely in a magical barrier with the magic practitioner (in this case, Stiles). Spirits aren’t always happy about being pulled away from their endless wandering of the earth, so it can be a risk to contact a spirit who might have malevolent intentions.

Stage 2: Asking the spirit a single question, which they have no choice but to answer truthfully. This is the stage that he and Erica are in now. Unfortunately, once he asks a direct question their conversation is pretty much over and they move on to the third stage.

There’s nothing to stop her from asking him questions, though.

She looks at him, startled. “You don’t remember?”

“I had an accident right before graduation and woke up with amnesia.”

Her expression is equal parts disbelief and exasperation. “Do you remember the pack?” When he doesn’t do anything more than blink at her, she chews her lip. “Memorial stones,” she says finally, gently knocking hers with the toe of an incorporeal boot. “Even if they knew where we died, there wouldn’t have been enough left of us to bury. Boyd and I were killed by werewolves, far away from Beacon Hills. We just…we weren’t fast enough.”

There are a few important details about this that Stiles would really like to get clarification on (mostly about werewolves apparently being real and fatally maiming teenagers) but Erica silences him with a ghostly finger against his lips.

“It wasn’t Derek’s fault,” she says emphatically. “You can tell him that, right? I don’t want him to feel responsible for our deaths… We shouldn’t have been out there, and… Just tell him that I don’t blame him for what happened, okay?”

“Derek…?” he murmurs, once she has taken her finger away and he feels able to speak again. It takes a couple of failed attempts before he voices the question, “Why does…” he hesitates before continuing, “ _Derek Hale,_ feel responsible for your deaths?”

“We never would have found out about the supernatural if Derek hadn’t offered us the bite in junior year. Even though we… I’m grateful for it. I didn’t expect to live much longer anyway and that year I really…I felt like I was _living,_ you know?”

Now that the question has been answered, they move on to the third and final stage.

Stage 3: The spirit bestows either a blessing or a curse upon the magic practitioner. They can’t be contacted again while their gift is still in effect, so if they want to avoid a repeat conversation they can make its effects lifelong.

“I guess they wanted to keep you out of it, after you lost your memory,” Erica muses. “It’s dangerous for kids like us. But it’s… _exciting._ This might help you understand it better.”

She brushes a phantom kiss against his cheek and steps back, smiling. Now that the conditions of their interaction have been fulfilled, her spirit leaves the sigil. For a strange and silent moment the tokens are suspended in the air, before they clatter against the memorial stone and finally settle in the dirt.

“Whoa,” says Stiles.

Trying to distract himself from the ever-rising tide of terrifying thoughts—that _werewolves are real_ and Derek, with eyes like the woods and a smile that’s hard to earn, is one of them—that people he went to high school with were killed violently by supernatural creatures—that he must have known at least some of this information before the accident—Stiles starts drawing a sigil in front of Boyd’s memorial stone.

Tokens fly up into the air when Boyd arrives, sharp pieces of metal in both of his palms, a brightly coloured stone in his skull, a pressed violet flower where his heart would have been and glass marbles for both of his lungs. He’s older, stronger-looking than Stiles remembers.

“Ask your question,” he tells him, straight to the point.

Stiles has been reading the memorial stone over and over again. “You were seventeen years old when you died.”

“That’s not a question.”

“No, it’s not—but it’s still important,” he tries to explain. “The average lifespan is seventy-eight years and seven months, and you died when you were seventeen years old. That’s about sixty years that you didn’t have to live your life, to reach your full potential-”

Boyd interrupts him, “I didn’t come here for a maths lesson.”

“The magic that I’m using to talk with you _right now_ ,” he says, pushing through, “it’s about life and death, yes, but more than that it’s about _potential._ When a person dies young, that’s a loss of potential—all the things that you could have done, the _millions_ of possible ways that you might have lived your life if you had been given more time-”

“Stiles-”

“You need to listen to me because _this is important._ I have the power to bring you and Erica back. The magic mourns the loss of your potential, it _wants_ to bring you back. And maybe that doesn’t make sense to you unless you’ve experienced magic before…” he mutters. “Here’s my question: If I offered you and Erica a second chance at living, would you accept it?”

Boyd answers, “Yes.” He says again, “Yes.” Then, “Bring Erica back first.”

He places a ghostly hand on Stiles’ shoulder, sharp metal threatening to tear his shirt. When his spirit departs, the tokens fall to the ground and everything is quiet again.

There’s so much information to process that his brain fixates on one word. “Werewolves,” he murmurs, absently shaking the dirt from his clothes and collecting up the tokens. His cell phone screen is bright enough that the time, 1:21 AM, burns into his retinas, but he valiantly persists in typing out a text to Vanessa:

_what do you know about werewolves?_


	6. house party

There is a bigger backlog of werewolf-themed movies than Stiles ever could have hoped. 1957’s black-and-white _I Was a Teenage Werewolf_ (in his opinion, the costume department should have won awards for the inspired decision of tufts of faux fur coming out of the actor’s shirt); 1981’s _Return of the Wolfman,_ 1997’s _An American Werewolf in Paris_ (with CGI monsters that look hilarious rather than horrifying, almost two decades later).

2000’s _Ginger Snaps_ finally answers the question of ‘what happens if you get your period around supernatural creatures?’ with ‘you become a supernatural creature’, which is long-awaited closure after watching the first _Twilight_ movie on a whim (he doesn’t like to talk about it).

The _Underworld_ series is arguably more about vampires than lycanthropes (and were-vampire hybrids), but it’s so awesome that he works his way through the four instalments in the name of research, while baking chocolate brownies for Scott and trying (unsuccessfully) to carve a rune out of sight underneath the kitchen sink.

Vanessa sends him a quick succession of texts later in the morning:

_They’re the reason why we don’t sell aconite products. Werewolves are fatally allergic to it._

_They run in packs with a hierarchy of alphas (red eyes) and betas (orange or blue eyes). Werewolves who don’t have a pack are called omegas, they aren’t as strong._

_I’ll email you an old PDF that we received from the local pack when the store first opened._

_Why do you ask???_

The PDF is the most promising source of information that he has so far. It’s titled: ‘Information Packet Regarding Store Operation in the Supernatural Community’.

_Ohhh, you ran into the established pack presence at Beacon Hills? LOL_

_Make sure you come back without any interesting new scars, or I’ll dock your holiday bonus._

Assuming that everything in the PDF is factually accurate, he can start searching the internet for more information than ‘basic etiquette when first meeting the alpha’ and ‘how to arrange floor displays without overwhelming a werewolf’s superior sense of smell’.

He’s particularly interested in how werewolves cope with their heightened senses in their human, ‘unshifted’ form.

Waking up to his alarm this morning involved several minutes of torture, after Erica’s blessing of supernatural hearing came into effect. Then he’d almost fallen down the stairs after gripping the banister and completely snapping the wood with his newfound physical strength, which could only be Boyd’s blessing.

Bleary-eyed and half-awake, it hadn’t really occurred to him that the blessings would be so much like having freaking superpowers. When he’d finally added _2 + 2 = holy fucking shit, I need to call a repairman because I broke the railing with my fucking hand,_ he rolled up the sleeve of his hoodie and inspected the vulnerable inside of his arm. 

Near the elbow are two neat rows of symbols that glow either blue for a blessing, or red for a curse. He has spoken to a few dozen spirits, who had a surprisingly wide range of responses to being called away from their purposeless wandering of the earth. A Polish grandmother blessed him with lifelong immunity from illness. His deceased neighbour apparently held a grudge because he liked to watch TV into the early hours of the morning and cursed him with intermittent insomnia (which only lasted a term, thank god).

Luckily, he figured out pretty early on that it’s possible to control the werewolf powers. 

If Stiles imagines the outer limit of his hearing as an invisible line that he can pull back into himself, then with practice he can extend that limit further or forget about it completely with his hearing functionally back to normal.

The super strength posed a problem that was more difficult to solve. Eventually, he dug out an old jade necklace from his wardrobe and repurposed it as a makeshift vessel of power. So long as he remembers to _wear_ the necklace, he can draw on that power whenever he might need it. (Although he kind of wonders what Boyd thinks he might come up against, that the ability to snap a wooden banister _in twain_ would be a worthwhile blessing.)

He usually doesn’t put much more effort into his appearance than pulling on a t-shirt, layering a button-down over it and keeping warm in the fall weather with a sweatshirt, sometimes a knitted beanie pulled over his hair. 

So of course his dad notices the necklace within minutes of his arrival at the hospital. 

“I haven’t seen you wear that for a long time.” It had been buried pretty deep in his wardrobe, along with ancient issues of _The Phantom_ comic books that he’d thrown there in a fit of pique. “Are you dressing up now that Lydia Martin’s back in town?”

“How do you know that Lydia is back in town?” he asks, tugging at the jade stone self-consciously. It’s smooth to the touch and sends a faint jolt of magic through his fingertips.

Dad gestures at the window. “She stopped by this morning with those flowers.”

In the language of flowers, the bouquet of vividly coloured chrysanthemums means ‘friendship, cheerfulness and rest’. On closer inspection, the chrysanthemum blooms (for protection and healing) have been lightly sprayed with lavender oil (for uninterrupted sleep). A rune has been painted on the side of the vase, disguised as ornate decoration. He traces first the rune for health and then, layered over it, another rune for patience.

The other flowers and cards left by people wishing their sheriff a speedy recovery aren’t nearly as significant.

Stiles decides on a change of topic. “I went to the cemetery yesterday and noticed that there were new memorial stones. For Erica Reyes and Vernon Boyd?”

“You remember them?” his dad asks, suddenly intent.

“From high school.”

“Ah.” His dad settles back against the pillows with a deep sigh. “Yeah, that was a tragedy. They both disappeared one night. Legally, they’re still missing persons, but I think after five years their parents just wanted some closure. I don’t blame them for that.”

“Did I know them?” Stiles stops his fingers from tracing the scar tissue at the base of his skull. “Before the accident?”

There’s a quiet moment before his dad nods. “You were friends. When they first went missing, you tried to help me with the investigation for a while.”

Even though he had been about 99% certain of that answer before asking the question, it’s still unsettling to hear that he had completely forgotten about people significant enough that they’d had nicknames for each other, that he’d tried to find out what happened to them after they went missing. “Do you think there’s a chance they could still be…?”

“I don’t ask those kinds of questions in my line of work, son. Trust me when I say that we did everything we possibly could.”

 _Not everything,_ Stiles thinks to himself.

The materials necessary to return spirits of the deceased to the physical world are expensive, even considering his 20% staff discount at Vanessa’s occult supply store. Runes cost practically nothing to make, talismans vary depending on what effect you want to achieve, and cooking with magical elements isn’t much more costly than everyday baking, but the value of a human life is beyond measuring—which means that the items that he will need are powerful conduits of magic, in high demand among the magical community.

Vanessa is a good businesswoman, so she’s definitely not going to give him a bigger discount and will probably just laugh when she sends him the bill.

It will be worth it, though. 

He was completely serious when he told Boyd that the magic wants them back—it thrives off the realisation of possibilities, which happens inevitably during a person’s life.

His best guess is that the Hale house fire must have been an enormous loss of potential. Erica and Boyd’s untimely deaths meant that the magic surrounding Beacon Hills went from ‘limited possibilities’ to ‘non-existent future’. Even if giving them a second chance at living wasn’t already a compelling reason, he’s pretty invested in Beacon Hill’s magical future.

When Melissa arrives at lunchtime with a tray of food, they’re halfway through an episode of _Jeopardy!_ (Stiles is $800 ahead thanks to a brief fascination with human anatomy, while his dad has been taking a high risk, high reward approach to all categories.)

Before he leaves, she tells him that she has an extra shift at short notice. “I figured that Scott could invite a few of his friends over.”

At the time he doesn’t really think anything of it because he expects that it will just be him, Scott and Derek playing _Mario Kart_ and ordering pizza.

It turns out that Scott is more popular now than he ever was in high school. When he arrives at the McCalls’, everything breakable has been moved out of the living room to relative safety upstairs. There are enough bottles of alcohol, syrups and mixers on the kitchen bench to qualify it as a bar. Someone has made a half-hearted effort at hanging tinsel along the stair railing.

Music plays from the speaker system in the living room, smooth and ambient.

Stiles clearly did not receive the same invitation that everybody else did, because he’s still wearing a sweatshirt with the shirt now wrinkled underneath it. Danny Mahealani, who greets him with a handshake and a smile, looks great in a short-sleeved button-down.

“Okay, _no_ ,” Stiles says immediately. “Give me a couple of minutes.”

After abandoning a Tupperware container of M&M cookies in the kitchen (an appropriate snack for game night with his best friend but not what he would have chosen to bring to a 20-somethings house party), he races up the stairs and proceeds to raid Scott’s wardrobe.

“Voila!” he says to no one, flourishing a black sweater with three-quarter sleeves. It’s more form-fitting than he would have picked out for himself and there’s nothing he can do to draw attention away from the jade necklace, but hey—fake it ’til you make it, right?

Walking back into the kitchen, he makes Danny laugh by saying, “Let’s try that again.”

He hadn’t realised that Scott still got along with his ex-girlfriend from high school, Allison…something. He can’t remember her last name but smiles when she waves at him.

Lydia Martin has only gotten more beautiful since the last time he saw her, which should not be possible. Her red hair is delicately arranged and held together with an ornate hair clip. It takes about two seconds to confirm his suspicion that yes, it is magic. The rune could be mistaken for a Chinese character, but it’s… He peers at it, squinting.

In high school she had never given any indication that she noticed him staring, so it catches him off-guard when she turns directly toward him. “What are you looking at?”

“I was just…admiring your hair clip,” he tries.

“Funny,” she replies with a knowing smirk, “I was just admiring your necklace.”

He touches it instinctively as she walks away in the direction of the kitchen.

Even Jackson Whittemore, playground bully turned law student, who once knocked Scott into a locker so hard that he ended up with a _concussion,_ is there (admittedly, looking sullen as he mixes alcoholic drinks and doesn’t say much to anyone other than Lydia and Danny).

Scott started dating Kira Yukimura some time in their senior year and their relationship has survived her moving to a college out of state, so Stiles isn’t surprised that she was invited. They’ve spoken a couple of times over Skype but never one-on-one. He waves but tries to avoid getting into a conversation that would possibly (probably) be awkward.

“Hey, that’s my-”

He turns around quickly and clamps a hand over his best friend’s mouth. 

Scott pries the hand away and says, “I wanted to introduce you to Isaac Lahey.” He gestures with his half-empty beer bottle at an unfamiliar person who comes over to them.

“Cheers,” says Isaac, knocking their bottles together.

In that motion, he sees blurred shapes through sea-green glass. The shapes shudder, partially hidden by the beer labels, as if there’s something floating in the liquid. 

“You’re not drinking anything,” Scott points out.

“No… I want to drive home later. Let me know if anyone needs a ride.” He glances around the room at people he hardly knows or doesn’t recognise at all and twists the jade necklace around, clutching the stone tightly in his palm. The pulse of magic has always been comforting. “I’m just- I’ll be outside for a little while, okay?”

Stepping into the cold night air is a welcome relief for about five seconds before he realises that Derek is already out here, sitting on the porch and looking directly at him.

He doesn’t look like the protagonists from _I was a Teenage Werewolf, Return of the Wolfman_ or _An American Werewolf in Paris._ A quick glance is enough to confirm that there are no tufts of fur coming out of the sleeves of his soft-looking shirt. Stiles can’t see any healed-over scars from bite marks or claw wounds on the exposed skin at his collar.

Vanessa had said that werewolves’ eyes are yellow, blue or red depending on their status in the pack hierarchy—but Derek’s eyes are hazel, like the woods on a sunlit day. There’s nothing about his appearance to suggest that he might be anything other than human.

 _But then,_ Stiles thinks, incredibly conscious of the jade necklace’s weight against his chest. _How many people make the mistake of thinking that I’m harmless, too?_


	7. twenty questions

The stars are twinkling brightly overhead and Derek’s features would be easy to make out even without light streaming across the porch from the party inside. It’s a third quarter moon tonight. Stiles’ research hasn’t actually told him if that has any effect on werewolves.

He doesn’t say a word when Stiles comes to sit down beside him. Their shoulders brush together long enough that he has the impression of hard muscle and warmth. It’s the last month of fall and all he’s wearing is a borrowed sweater, so he shifts a little closer. 

His newly heightened sense of hearing makes it possible to pass a minute in peaceful quiet, just listening to the regular _thump, thump, thump_ of Derek’s heart.

“Want to play twenty questions?”

Derek takes a drink from his beer bottle before replying, “You go first.”

“Hmm… What’s your favourite kind of chocolate?”

“White chocolate.” 

“That’s not even really chocolate!” he says, outraged.

Derek just smiles at him, warm and self-satisfied like he had anticipated this reaction and finds it amusing. “My turn. What’s your favourite kind of chocolate?”

“I think there should be a rule against repeating the other person’s questions,” he grumbles. “Chocolate ice cream.”

Derek’s smile widens to an outright _grin_ and for a second Stiles is convinced that all the air has been punched out of his lungs. “That isn’t really chocolate,” he points out.

“Weeeell,” he says, drawing out the word so it doesn’t sound as breathless. “Where have you lived, aside from Beacon Hills?”

“I lived in an apartment in New York with my older sister for two years. That’s where I got my college degree. Then I,” he idly rubs a hand along his stubbled jaw, “travelled around California for a couple of months before moving back here permanently.”

“What did you study at college?” he asks, curious.

“Art history,” Derek tells him. “That’s two questions, so now I get to ask you two questions: how long have you been friends with Scott, and what are you studying at college?”

“I’ve been friends with Scott pretty much since the first day we met. We weren’t in the same class at school but my mom worked as volunteer at the library for a while. She was supervising arts and crafts for kids so that their parents could relax while browsing books, I guess. Scott let me pour glitter over his hair just because I thought it would look cool. I was grounded for like, a week—which is a really long time for an eight-year-old!” he says defensively, “and there was glitter on Scott’s clothes for _months._

“I’m studying history at college. I wanted to learn about warfare and how it’s changed over the centuries, but the course is more about the different ways that people have documented history and how modern historians can interpret that.” He waves a hand in the air to communicate that he doesn’t want to go into great detail about it. “I’ve always wondered: how did you first meet Scott?”

It takes a second for Derek to answer, “He trespassed on my property.”

“That doesn’t sound like something that Scott would do,” he says doubtfully.

Derek gives an ineloquent shrug. “Where do you work?” he asks, changing the subject.

“I work five days a week at a supply store. Public holidays, too. It’s pretty busy and the owner is reluctant to hire new staff, because many of the products that we sell are fragile.” It had finally become necessary for Vanessa to hire trainees but he knows that she’s still wary about them. “Same question: where do you work?”

“It wasn’t…” He hesitates, his knee jumping almost imperceptibly. “I didn’t have to work, after the fire. I inherited the land, and…”

“You don’t have to tell me anything if it makes you feel uncomfortable,” Stiles assures him.

Derek’s jaw tightens and then relaxes again. “I inherited enough that I didn’t have to work. I held a couple of part-time jobs during college and now I’m a…” he hesitates, searching for the word, “…consultant, for the local government.”

“It’s your turn to ask a question,” he says softly.

When Derek looks over at him, the moonlight hits his eyes in such a way that they appear to be an impossibly bright, electric blue. That means that he’s a beta werewolf, Stiles realises. “After the accident, the doctor said that you would have a scar…”

“You want to see it?” he guesses. It’s not an uncommon request, when people find out that he was in a car accident and ended up with amnesia. Stiles turns his head but doesn’t move to sit any further away. “It’s…” he pushes fingers through his hair, searching for the scar, “…here.”

Derek asks, “Can I touch it?” 

That’s also not an uncommon request, though people don’t usually think to ask beforehand. “Sure,” he replies, conscious that his heart beat is picking up. Even though he’s expecting it, the feel of Derek’s fingers brushing gently through the short hair at the back of his head makes him swallow nervously before he makes an effort to breathe out and relax.

After a long moment, Derek says, “Thank you.”

Stiles turns to look at him, surprised. “You’re…welcome. Uh, it’s my turn now, right? When…” He has to take another deep breath, working up the courage to ask the question. “When I woke up at the hospital, you were there. My dad…and Melissa, they told me that you found me after the accident and rode with me in the ambulance. You…”

It takes another deep breath and another try: “Did I know you, before the accident?”

Derek doesn’t say anything but his face twists up, like he isn’t sure which emotion to express.

“It’s just that I have no memory of you coming back to Beacon Hills. I knew about the fire. Everyone knew about the fire. It wasn’t really a surprise when you and Laura moved away. But you’re telling me that you moved back after less than three years? I don’t remember that. I don’t remember ever running into you at the grocery store, or seeing you walk down the street. I don’t know what happened to the Hale property and I don’t-”

Then there are warm hands on either side of his face. “Stiles,” says Derek, his expression concerned and his voice grounding. “Yes, I knew you before the fire. It’s okay that you don’t remember what happened. I can tell you about it, whenever you’re ready.”

“I’m…” he tries to speak but has to swallow the sentence and start again. “I’m not ready yet.”

“Okay,” Derek says simply and takes his hands away. “Do you want to keep playing?”

“It’s your turn.”

“What do you plan to do after graduating?”

This should be a difficult question to answer, but it’s not.

“I’m going to move back here.” 

When he had left for college that first time, it felt like a new beginning. He had imagined the different places that he would live and where he might finally settle down. Now, he has a better idea of just how strange and interesting Beacon Hills can be. (Werewolves talking him down from the brink of a panic attack! A witch who secretly makes talismans to protect the people who she cares about! Honestly, his life would make a great television show.)

Derek smiles at him again before taking another drink from his beer bottle.

Moonlight glints off the glass, which is how Stiles notices that there is something floating in the liquid: a waterlogged flower with distinctively shaped petals. It’s impossible to identify the colour through the green-tinted glass but he would bet money that it’s a vivid purple. 

Aconite (also known as devil’s helmet, queen of all poisons, blue rocket and wolfsbane) is extremely poisonous to humans and causes a fatal allergic reaction in werewolves. It has magical properties but he’s never used it because it has always been banned from the store.

“Can I have some of your beer?” he asks with false casualness.

“I’m almost finished,” Derek tells him. “If you want, I could go and get you a drink?”

“No, thanks. I think that counts as a question, so it’s my turn again. I’d really like to know why a werewolf is drinking a beer laced with aconite.” 

Beside him, Derek goes very still. Then he slowly and deliberately relaxes, turning the beer bottle over in his hands to consider the flower in the moonlight. “I don’t drink beer for the taste,” he says finally, “and alcohol doesn’t affect me without added wolfsbane.”

“It’s your turn.”

“You can’t guess the question that I’m going to ask?”

Stiles reaches for the now-empty beer bottle and holds it up carefully, so the aconite— _wolfsbane,_ he called it—is silhouetted against the third quarter moon.

“How did you know?”

“I don’t think you would believe me if I told you,” he answers honestly, putting the bottle down where he won’t accidentally knock it over and inadvertently poison himself. 

Derek’s irises are supernatural blue, appearing to produce their own light. He wonders if that’s the colour that magic would be if it was tangible.

Without thinking about it too hard, he reaches out and rests fingers lightly against the pulse point at Derek’s neck: _thump, thump, thump, thump._ “Can you hear my heart beat?”

“Always,” he murmurs, curling a hand loosely around his forearm. He taps out the rhythm of Stiles’ heart beating in his chest, keeping time even when it quickens. _Tap, tap, tap, tap._ It’s a dissonant harmony with the pulse underneath his fingertips.

“Your turn,” Stiles whispers.

His smile is unexpected and _so close._ “You can’t guess?”

He bites his lower lip before returning the smile. “Something about kissing me in the moonlight?” There is the scent of sandalwood cologne in the air, stubble brushing against the pad of his thumb and his heart is beating _ridiculously fast,_ but-

A possibly imminent heart attack rates lower on his list of priorities than turning his head so that their lips brush together at _just the right angle._ Derek’s lips are warm and soft (without any protruding canines), and he breathes out a sigh before they kiss again, more deeply.

Derek rubs a thumb along his cheek, fingers resting against the sensitive skin behind an ear. Not only is he _100% okay with that,_ he wants other exhilarating points of contact. Without breaking the kiss Stiles shifts close enough that their thighs are pressed together and he can comfortably sling an arm around Derek’s shoulders.

When Derek hums, sounding pleased, he can feel the sound where their chests are touching and that’s _amazing._ “Do that again,” he urges against Derek’s mouth, twisting his free hand into the ( _soft, so incredibly soft_ ) material of his shirt.

Derek chuckles instead of complying and presses forward to kiss him again and—somehow the blissful haze of _warmth_ and _touch_ and _tongue_ isn’t enough to distract him from the incredible fact that he just heard Derek Hale laugh for the first time.

That’s enough to make him draw back and _just look_ at Derek, his expression soft and open. His eyes are like the woods or the colour of magic and Stiles _trusts_ him, wants to tell him everything that he hasn’t worked up the courage to tell anyone else. “I…” 

There are so many secrets that he could tell—about magic, the conversation he had with Erica’s spirit, that he never really came out as bi to anyone in Beacon Hills, what it felt like those first weeks after his mom was gone and it seemed like Dad was far away, too- 

Derek waits patiently for him to finish the sentence, then brushes a thumb across his cheek and newly-kissed lips. “It’s okay,” he tells him. “We can talk whenever you’re ready.” 

If tarot reading involved any actual magic, Stiles is pretty sure that ‘extremely good-looking, considerate and already accepted by my loved ones’ wouldn’t be on the cards for him. 

Maybe that’s why the door behind them opens, suddenly. 

Scott doesn’t look happy to see them tangled together like this. His reaction matters far less than the beer bottle that he’s holding—newly opened, with wolfsbane floating in the liquid. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> consent is important my friends


	8. so, what's your origin story?

The realisation that Scott is a werewolf and never told him packs an emotional punch of _hurt_ (they’ve been friends since they were eight years old!), _anger_ (to repeat: they’ve been friends since they were _eight years old_ ), _guilt_ (it’s not like he’s been forthcoming about his own supernatural status) and _self-loathing_ (even though he knows better than to think this is about his trustworthiness, his brain doesn’t always work as designed).

They’ve been friends long enough that Scott knows to give him time and space before a Serious Conversation about why he left the party so abruptly—which is why he isn’t expecting the doorbell to ring that morning.

Lydia’s lips are redder than blood and curve into a devastating smile. “Can I come in?”

He had abandoned a talisman-in-progress to eat microwaved popcorn and watch cheesy black-and-white horror movies but, aside from possibly questioning his decision to view 1931’s _Dracula_ for the nth time, he figures that she won’t care too much about that.

“Uh, sure,” he replies.

Walking through to the living room, she raises an eyebrow at the magical ingredients that he had left scattered across the low table, alongside a bag of popcorn and empty coffee mugs. “Dental floss, _really?”_

“Hey, I’m a magic practitioner on a budget,” he says, putting up his hands defensively.

She settles into an armchair, crossing her legs in a way that draws attention to her impressively high heels. “Fresh ingredients are more potent.”

“I’ll take your word for it. I don’t have much experience making talismans.”

“Clearly.” Lydia casts a critical eye over the table then gestures at the jars of dried herbs that he had bought from the grocery store. “Those won’t last longer than a couple of months. Buy fresh ingredients, use essences as a binding agent and if you’re going to tie them up in a _semi-permeable_ sachet, don’t use dental floss—the combination of scents mean an imminent headache for anyone with a decent sense of smell.”

“You mean werewolves.”

Thanks to a lengthy infatuation with her when they were younger, he knows that this expression (a light in her eyes and almost imperceptible twist at one corner of her mouth) means that she’s pleased. “Werewolves aren’t the only supernatural creatures out there.”

He gets the impression that she’s trying to intimidate him with that information, or gauge how much of the supernatural world he is actually aware of. As it happens, once you find out that magic is real everything that comes after is surprisingly easy to accept.

“So, how is it that you went away to college without any magical ability to speak of, and now you’re crafting talismans and wearing,” she points a manicured fingernail at the jade necklace (that he had barely remembered to put on when he got dressed this morning), “ _…that,_ which seems to hold a significant amount of power?”

Stiles hesitates because he hasn’t told this story to more than a handful of people.

“In my first year of college, I started having unsettling dreams. At first, I would just wake up without remembering what the dreams were about. Then I began lucid dreaming. I can’t describe what it was like, even though I’ve tried. I just can’t.

“I developed insomnia and it got bad enough that I had trouble differentiating between dreams and reality. I was desperate to try anything that might help. Finally, I ended up at an occult store with an armful of books about lucid dreaming and talismans that promised a restful night’s sleep. They worked so well that for a while I was convinced it had all been psychosomatic. Anyway, the person working at the store actually ended up offering me a job. I figured it would be an easy way to earn some extra money and…yeah.

“What’s your magical origin story?” he asks.

“I was attacked by a werewolf in high school,” she tells him impassively, “and I decided that I would never be that defenceless again.”

When it becomes clear that she won’t into any greater detail than that, he changes the subject: “Are you the reason why the cemetery is under magical protection?”

Lydia sighs, long-suffering. “Betas have been encroaching on our pack’s territory. We can handle a wandering omega without any trouble, but betas are strengthened by the pack that they belong to—and we don’t want outright conflict with the neighbouring pack, so we’re taking a diplomatic approach. They haven’t returned the favour,” she says drily. “Another ‘animal attack’ and the sheriff will force our hand, though.”

“My dad…?”

“And Melissa McCall,” she informs him. “They’re the only fully human members of our pack.”

Before Stiles has time to really process that information, his cell phone buzzes with a text:

_Pack meeting tonight at Scott’s house, starts at 6pm._

Smiling down at the screen, he types out a reply to Derek:

_is this an invitation to your super secret werewolf club?_

Derek replies simply:

_Bring M &M cookies._

When he glances up again, Lydia is considering him as if he were a particularly challenging math problem: with her own distinctive combination of curiosity and resolve.

“Uh,” he says eloquently.

“What do you know about the sigils that were left recently at the cemetery, near Erica Reyes’ and Vernon Boyd’s memorial stones?” She taps manicured fingernails against her thigh.

“Oh, that was me,” he confirms.

Lydia’s eyes narrow. “You’ve been communicating with the dead?”

His cell phone buzzes with another text. This time, Derek has sent an inexpertly taken selfie from somewhere out in the preserve. _Going for a run,_ he has written. Strands of hair are stuck to his forehead with sweat (which makes Stiles think of other, less G-rated things). His free arm is blurred, as if he had moved it while taking the photo. 

There’s a smile in his eyes and Stiles can’t help but grin at the sight of it.

He answers distractedly, “Well, yeah. You must have noticed that the magic here is…” he searches for the correct word, while typing out a reply, “…unbalanced, like a broken set of scales. Too many people have died here who should have lived for much longer than they did. Erica and Boyd were _seventeen years old._ The magic mourns that loss of potential, and it…” he trails off to re-read the message— _how many selfies are m &m cookies worth?_—before pressing send. “It needs potential like we need sunlight. The easiest way to fix the problem is to bring them back.” 

“Bring them back?” she asks, voice quiet.

Stiles gestures at the magical ingredients that are laid out in front of them. “I can’t make talismans that are anywhere near as effective as yours, but _I can do this._ Trust me.”

For several moments, she studies his expression instead of talking. “Is it dangerous?”

A sigil serves as a barrier between the metaphysical and physical worlds. Standing inside it, he is the only person who could be affected if anything went wrong during the ritual.

Since the spirits of Erica and Boyd are friendly and he’s designed sigils capable of withstanding the magical equivalent of an atomic bomb, there isn’t much risk involved.

“Nope,” he says, popping out the ‘p’ sound.

Though she seems unconvinced, Lydia doesn’t ask him any more questions about the ritual. Instead she leans forward to pick up the half-finished talisman, opening the sachet so that herbs and dried flowers rest on gossamer material in the middle of her palm. Frowning at the combination of mint and shaved cinnamon, she asks, “What is this for?”

“Good health.”

Lydia laughs at that and leaves without explaining why. 

_Mint leaves (for luck) + cinnamon (for healing and success) = good health, right?_

He considers the talisman for a few bewildered seconds before throwing it in the trash. Before they’d even graduated from elementary school, he had learned never to second-guess Lydia Martin.

The afternoon passes quickly, between visiting his dad at the hospital (they choose different teams on an episode of _Family Feud_ and he wins just because Dad keeps laughing too much to answer in time) and negotiating the accepted ratio of selfies to homemade cookies with Derek (when they settle on an equal exchange of selfies, 1:1, with two cookies going to Derek every time, he realises that he’s been played).

Thanks to either excitement or nervousness, he parks outside of Scott’s house much earlier than six o’clock. He would text Scott to check if he’s home and awake to let him in, but they’re due for a Serious Conversation that is likely to result in Feelings and Bro Hugging.

There are two other options: he could find a drive-through somewhere to pass the time, or practice using his super werewolf hearing to check if there’s anyone at home.

His first attempt at extending the outer limit of his hearing past the walls of Scott’s house goes badly— _the near-deafening hiss of water through pipes, electricity buzzing, an irregular snapping he can’t identify, thudding heart beats clamouring for his attention and thunderous voices_ —all of the sensory information is so difficult to parse that he nearly panics, immediately overwhelmed. 

He jerks his hearing back and focuses on measured breaths in and out before trying again. This time he goes slowly, concentrating on the sound of heart beats and people talking.

 _“-don’t have the resources to deal with this while there’s a territory dispute still going on,”_ says Scott, sounding calm and authoritative.

Allison insists, _“This isn’t just something that we can ignore and hope it goes away.”_

Jackson agrees with her, loudly enough that he has to dial back the super hearing. _“-look at the facts. There is a necromancer in Beacon Hills talking to the ghosts of people who used to be members of this pack! That doesn’t worry any of you? Lydia already told us how it works—they have no choice but to answer the necromancer’s questions. That-”_

In his surprise, his hearing snaps back to normal human levels. He tries again.

_“-said it yourself, they should have announced their presence in Beacon Hills to the pack-”_

_“That was how it worked ten years ago,”_ Derek interrupts. _“We haven’t been formally acknowledged as the pack with control over this territory for long enough to know whether or not those customs have changed.”_

_“We don’t know who the necromancer is or what their intentions are. It’s possible that this could just be a miscommunication, right?”_

There are various sounds of disbelief and outright scorn at Kira’s suggestion.

Stiles closes his eyes, tightening his grip on the steering wheel.

_“We can’t afford to give them the benefit of the doubt. How do we stop them if they try to use the information against us? Or worse, bring Erica and Boyd back as their thralls, without any free will of their own? What if they-”_

He presses his forehead against the steering wheel, running fingers through his hair, over the scar at the base of his skull where the hair won’t ever grow again. _They think I’m going to…_ he thinks somewhat hysterically.

 _“Kill the necromancer first, ask questions later,”_ Jackson says ruthlessly.

Kira points out, _“They might not mean any harm.”_

_“Better safe than sorry.”_

Derek speaks with a quality to his voice that Stiles usually can’t hear—rough undertones, the edge of an animalistic growl. _“I agree that we need to be careful. Erica and Boyd deserve better than to have their memorial stones desecrated like that. We should focus on identifying the necromancer and then incapacitate them.”_

_“How do you plan on doing that?”_ If Lydia hadn’t asked the question, he wouldn’t have realised that she was present at the meeting. She has been uncharacteristically quiet. 

_“By any means necessary,”_ he replies.

 _“They might listen to reason,”_ says Kira.

 _“Maybe,”_ Scott concedes. _“None of this matters until we know who the necromancer is. Stiles will be getting here soon, so that’s the end of this discussion for now-”_

At the sound of his own name, Stiles gives an involuntary gasp. His heart is pounding too hard—his hands shake, making it difficult to turn the key in the ignition—his cell phone begins to ring and _he can’t deal with any of this right now—_

It’s a minor miracle when the engine starts up and he drives away from the curb.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lucid dreaming is terrifying


	9. sacrifices

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: violence

_Scott McCall          Sent at 8:02 PM_

_Hey. I thought you were coming to the pack meeting tonight? Derek said that he invited you._  
_I really want you to meet everybody._  
_We don’t bite! (Just kidding.)_  
_Anyway, it would be great to talk about how this werewolf thing works._

_Scott McCall        Sent at 8:10 PM_

_I’m sorry for not telling you earlier. We thought it was the best decision after the accident, when you lost your memories.  
If you didn’t know, you weren’t in so much danger._

_Scott McCall        Sent at 8:21 PM_

_We don’t have to talk about what’s going on between you and Derek.  
Unless you want to._

_Scott McCall        Sent at 8:28 PM_

_Call me, okay?_

There are five missed calls from Scott and one from Derek when he checks his cell phone. He had put it on silent and tossed it onto the passenger seat after arriving at the cemetery.

His hands have been dirtied by preparations for the ritual. Still, he doesn’t do more to clean up than ineffectually wipe them against his old flannel shirt before typing out a message:

_Stiles Stilinski        Sent at 9:40 PM_

_how long has my dad been a member of your pack?_

_Scott McCall        Sent at 9:40 PM_

_He joined after the accident._  
_Is everything okay?_  
_Why didn’t you show up at the pack meeting?_

_Stiles Stilinski        Sent at 9:41 PM_

_kind of busy at the moment  
were you ever going to tell me?_

_Scott McCall        Sent at 9:42 PM_

_I wanted to but it was too dangerous for you.  
Why aren’t you answering your phone?_

Everything is ready for the ritual. This sigil took more than an hour to draw and is made up of three concentric circles: The innermost encircles the memorial stones with enough room for several people to stand comfortably inside it. The middle serves as a secondary barrier, confining spirits within the sigil until he allows them to leave. The outermost extends almost to the fence around the cemetery and was strengthened with powdered mountain ash. It’s a last minute consideration; he’s never had to worry about outside interference before.

Tokens are placed wherever the lines intersect: burnished and shining coins, shards of stained glass and jagged metal, coloured and nondescript stones, marbles, preserved flowers, warped bottle caps and delicate pieces of jewellery.

Among them are rosemary (for peace and tranquillity), sage (for purification) and bay leaves (for warding off negativity), tied together with dental floss because this kind of magic doesn’t care so much about presentation. They sway slightly in the breeze.

_Scott McCall        Sent at 9:58 PM_

_Where are you right now?_

_Stiles Stilinski        Sent at 9:59 PM_

_at the cemetery_

_Scott McCall        Sent at 10:00 PM_

_You shouldn’t be there after dark!_  
_It’s really dangerous._  
_There’s a necromancer in town._  
_I’ll be there in a couple of minutes, okay?_

His laughter has an edge of hysteria.

_Stiles Stilinski        Sent at 10:02 PM_

_we really need to talk about your definition of the word ‘dangerous’_

The items that he had ordered from Vanessa are unassuming, for all that they’re powerful conduits of magical energy that he knows must be highly sought-after: old rings engraved with runes that are nearly worn down to smoothness. They reflect moonlight dully, amplifying the current of magic that starts at his fingertips.

When he stands at the centre of the sigil, it feels like a _crashing wave_ of magic—wild, overwhelming, impossible to resist. With an exertion of considerable willpower, he channels the magic up to his heart, where it follows the blood in his veins to every other part of his body—then he sends it down into the earth, flowing through the shallow lines that he had drawn in the dirt, swirling around the sprigs and tokens—altering its shape, fluid as water.

Distantly, he is aware of voices:

_“-can’t cross the mountain ash-”_

_“-make sure that she gets here as soon as possible-”_

_“-only one heart beat in the cemetery, but that means-”_

Tokens rush up into the air, signalling that the spirits of Erica and Boyd have arrived.

Even when the magic is cooperative, it’s not easy to direct so much raw power—a drop of sweat slides past his ear, making him shiver slightly—still, he grins at the sight of them. 

“This might hurt,” he warns.

Erica is looking at the cemetery entrance behind him. 

“You or us?” she asks, sounding concerned.

He turns around and is blinded for a moment by the too-bright headlights of a car. When he blinks away the imprint of white circles on his vision, he sees that Lydia has arrived and is walking over to where Scott, Derek and Jackson must have already been standing. 

The mountain ash barrier will only work to keep them away until it’s broken by a human. 

To his surprise, Lydia steps over the mountain ash without breaking it. Ignoring the protests of the werewolves behind her, she walks through the cemetery on impossibly high heels, careful not to knock over any of the tokens or otherwise damage the sigil.

She steps close enough that he can see her wide-eyed expression in the moonlight. For a brief, silent moment, she looks between the semitransparent figures of Boyd and Erica. Then she nods her head, turning away and walking back past the cemetery’s entrance.

Unfortunately, Lydia isn’t the only human member of the Beacon Hills pack.

Practically the moment that Melissa breaks the line of mountain ash, a half-shifted werewolf Jackson with supernaturally bright orange eyes that he will see in his nightmares for years to come—assuming he survives tonight—closes the distance.

“Oh, shit!” he shouts, desperately clutching at the jade necklace.

Maybe two seconds before he’s ripped apart by _savage teeth_ and _claws sharper than knives,_ Boyd’s blessing of werewolf strength comes into effect.

He catches Jackson off-guard by pushing back, knocking him to the ground—but a moment later, Jackson is standing up and snarling, clawing _deep_ into the flesh of his shoulder. Stiles cries out at the pain, which feels first so _blistering hot_ and then _impossibly cold,_ pushing back his attacker frantically and probably only succeeding thanks to either the blessing or the sheer amount of magic pulsing through his blood-

Then Jackson is knocked out of commission and he turns his attention to the seemingly _endless_ stream of red, soaking through the material of his shirt and down into the ground. 

Phantom hands come around to gently cover his eyes. Though they’re incorporeal, the coins in Erica’s palms are solid and he can feel the cold press of them against his eyelids. 

“You should go to the hospital,” she whispers.

“No.” Now that so much magic has been channelled through his body, it can’t just be released. Adrenalin and sheer resolve will have to keep him standing upright—that, and the unexpected support of a body along his back and pressure that will staunch the bleeding. 

The ritual doesn’t involve any chanting aloud in an ancient language. Just half-forgotten memories of when Erica and Boyd were alive— _a disassembled pen and a quiet student sitting in the back row_ —and the willpower to endure the magic travelling up through his fingertips, to his heart, out along every line of the sigil and then _back again_ —

“Stiles,” a voice is murmuring close to his ear. “Stiles. Stiles.”

—waves of _ever-increasing power_ that he would not have the capacity to channel without the rings that he’s wearing—enough to bring two spirits from the metaphysical world back into the physical world that they had left too early.

Their forms waver and then solidify.

Still, he doesn’t really believe that the ritual has been successful. Not until he’s half-slumped to the ground, the sleeve of his shirt shredded and bloodied—and he notices that the illuminated symbols of Erica and Boyd’s blessings have disappeared.

His skin is slick with blood and he can’t feel the dirt underneath his fingers, or pressed against his cheek when he’s no longer able to support his own weight. It takes several moments longer than it should for him to recognise a partially buried sprig of rosemary.

 _For peace,_ he remembers, _and…_

There’s that voice again, calling his name.


	10. serious conversations

For a full minute Stiles believes that he has travelled back in time to right after the accident: waking up in a crowded hospital room, disoriented and with the strange impression of pain dulled by what must have been strong painkillers.

Then he realises that Derek Hale is sitting next to the bed, holding his hand. The veins at his wrist are turning black before disappearing past the cuff of that old, familiar leather jacket.

“Wha…?” he asks muzzily. 

Their fingers are intertwined. When he tries to tighten his grip, to reassure himself that this is a _real thing_ that is _actually happening,_ Derek’s other hand covers them both. He shakes his head slightly to discourage him from moving again.

“How are you feeling, son?” his dad asks from where he’s sitting on the other side of the bed. 

He looks around the room at his small crowd of well-wishers. 

Scott is practically wringing his hands on the edge of the blanket, an expression on his face that’s both guilty and hopeful. 

Isaac (whose last name he completely forgot, sometime between ‘my best friend is a werewolf’ and ‘last minute magic ritual’) was either unwise or tired enough to buy coffee from the hospital cafeteria. Allison Argent has propped her chin on his shoulder.

Danny Mahealani offers him a sympathetic smile as he types something out on his cell phone. Kira Yukimura has a ‘get well soon!’ balloon with a teddy bear on it tied with a ribbon around her wrist. Lydia stands at the window sill, appearing to pay more attention to a bright bouquet of flowers than the patient that she’d brought them for. 

Erica has found a leather jacket and red lipstick that draws attention to her mouth as she smiles widely, beautifully. Boyd has an arm around her shoulders, looking gruff despite the clear imprint of a red lipsticked kiss on his cheek.

“Déjà vu.” His voice is quieter than he had intended, but given that half the people in this room have super werewolf hearing, it’s not really a big deal.

Dad clears his throat. “There’s something that we should tell you…something that we should have told you years ago, about the accident.”

“It wasn’t a car accident,” Scott blurts out.

If they had been practicing their confession while he was unconscious, he guesses that Scott just went off-script because there’s a suspended moment where no one says anything. 

With the flowers arranged to her satisfaction, Lydia gives an exasperated sigh and turns around. “Five years ago, you were a member of the pack. We had been investigating a supernatural presence in the woods for weeks when you figured out what it was. Then, you went out into the woods without telling anybody,” her tone communicates exactly what she thinks about that course of action, “and made an exchange. For a long time, we didn’t know what you had traded your memories for-”

“My memories?” he manages to ask.

“Of anything supernatural,” Scott tells him.

“Before the ‘accident’, you had a spark of magical ability but nothing more powerful than that. We didn’t realise until the ritual that this was what you must have traded for.” She brushes a fingertip along the petal of a sunflower and he imagines the soft thrum of magic.

“It worked,” he says and then again, “It worked.”

She raises an eyebrow at him. “You told me that it wouldn’t be dangerous.”

“Usually, I’m not getting attacked by a werewolf,” he points out.

Isaac asks interestedly, “So you’ve done this before?”

“See, these are the questions you could have asked before planning to capture or attack me for being an ‘evil necromancer’.” He’s getting tired too quickly. Resting his head back against the pillow, he takes a moment to appreciate regular breathing and the warmth of Derek’s hands. When he glances over, there are eyes like the woods on a sunlit day and a smile that’s becoming increasingly familiar—and gentle tapping against his skin, counting out his heart beats, another reassurance that he’s _still here,_ that he’s survived.

“I returned the spirit of a toddler who had died,” he tells them. Something that he will never, ever forget is the sound of his neighbour crying when the child had walked out of the sigil and into her waiting arms. “And a girl who had been…murdered.” He still finds it difficult to talk about that, but she hadn’t. Her spirit had been the strongest that he has ever met.

“How many people?” Lydia asks out of curiosity.

He closes his eyes briefly, feeling like he should have a headache. “Seven…?” he guesses. A hand presses against his forehead and he sighs, relaxing into the pillow.

“You didn’t mention this during our Skype calls,” his dad says wryly.

“I wasn’t sure how to tell you that magic is real,” he admits. “And, uh… While we’re getting everything out in the open, I’m actually bi?” He didn’t mean for it to sound like a question (because he is 100% sure that he is down with whatever people have got going on) and curses inwardly, tightening his grip on Derek’s hand.

“Thank you for telling me, son,” his dad says seriously, then: “I’ll admit that I’m still caught on what you were saying earlier, about your ability to resurrect the dead.”

Stiles grins, reaching up to weakly tug Derek’s hand away from his forehead and down to his chest, settling where his heart is beating, twining their fingers together against the hospital gown. He could fall asleep like this—the warmth of holding another person’s hand, the pillow supporting the heavy weight of his head, the scent of sandalwood and sunflowers in the air. They must have given him the really strong painkillers for him to be feeling this at ease, or…

He traces the black veins chasing up Derek’s arm with shaking fingers. “Werewolf magic?”

“He’s taking your pain,” Scott explains.

“Oh.” For a second he just blinks at the physical representation of a feeling, black, shadowy. Then he draws on what little remaining energy he has to pull his hand away abruptly. All at once, _the pain sinks into his flesh, right down to the bones—his shoulder screams alarm—the headache is worse than he would have anticipated, bringing dizziness and nausea with it-_

Relief comes when Derek takes his hand again. “Let me.”

It was bad enough that he doesn’t want to argue. “Don’t take all of it.”

“Just let me do this, Stiles,” he insists.

He has the sudden realisation that this might be an apology, so he lets him. His eyelids feel heavy with exhaustion. He remembers the sound of his name, whispered over and over—pain so intense that his body didn’t know how to respond to it, other than with alarm—another person supporting his weight, trying to keep him from crumpling uselessly to the ground—warm hands and heart beats, a comforting _thump, thump, thump-_

It’s not so surprising that he would fall asleep, considering that he was recently _attacked by a werewolf_ and served as a focal point for magic powerful enough to bring two spirits back into the physical world, like that prism on the cover of _The Dark Side of the Moon._

When he wakes up the talisman has been moved to his bedside, close enough to touch. “Sunflowers,” he murmurs, “for vitality and happiness.” The yellow petals are soft against his skin and resilient enough to withstand his hand’s shaking.

Later, his dad visits with crutches supporting the bulk of his weight. “Go figure that you would be admitted to hospital the day before I’m discharged,” he remarks.

They watch an episode of _The Simpsons_ on low volume because he has about a 60-40 chance of having a bad headache at any given moment. Switching the television off once the credits begin to roll, his dad turns to him with a serious expression. 

He hesitates before asking, quietly, “Do we need to have a talk about your mom?”

“Dad,” he says. “Dad, I’m sorry. I can’t bring her back. That’s why I started practicing this kind of magic, but it’s… It’s all about potential, and Mom… She lived her life fully enough that the magic has let her go, and I can’t bring her back without giving something equal to the value of her life in exchange.” The value of a human life is immeasurable and the only thing equal to it is _another human life._

He blinks away tears. “I’m sorry. I miss her so much but I can’t…she wouldn’t want me to-”

“It’s okay, son,” his dad reassures him with the same gentle voice that comforted him after storms, nightmares and hospital visits. “Now, I think you should get some sleep.”

He’s surrounded by the scent of sunflowers and the same cologne that his dad has been wearing for years—a calloused hand smooths back the hair from his forehead-

The worst thing about being injured badly enough to be hospitalised, is that he’s pretty much incapable of staying awake for more than a few hours at a time.

Blinking awake, he accepts the tablets and plastic cup of water that Scott offers him. Before the painkillers can get to work, Scott touches his arm to take the pain away. It was bad—like his whole body didn’t know how to respond to a shoulder wound and started freaking out-but as the veins blacken sickeningly up his arm Scott doesn’t even flinch. 

Which means that either being a werewolf means having a ridiculously high pain threshold or Scott has gone through more than Stiles would have ever guessed, based on their cheerful conversations over Skype and his Facebook timeline.

“You texted me,” Scott says, staring down at the pain that’s visible on his skin, “before the accident. I couldn’t get to the woods in time. It was Derek who found you and carried you to the hospital. I should have been there. I should have-”

“You should have told me what was going on after the doctor diagnosed me with amnesia.”

He protests, “But it was too-”

“I swear to god, Scott, if you’re about to say that it would have been _too dangerous_ then I’ll have to remind you that we’re in hospital right now, so clearly _it was dangerous not to tell me._ We could have helped each other. You, with…whatever a werewolf pack does. Me, with my magic. There were a few months where telling you over the phone about all the confusing bullshit that I was dealing with would have really made things easier. Instead we just talked about our jobs and-”

It occurs to him that he has never said, “I work at an occult supply store, by the way. All of the staff are magic practitioners and we sell everything that the magical community might need—because there’s a community of magic practitioners and I _couldn’t talk about it-_ ”

“Why didn’t you tell us that you had magic?”

Stiles blinks at him. “Well, most people believe that magic isn’t real,” he points out.

“Most people believe that werewolves aren’t real!”

“It’s not the same, Scott! You had a whole group of people who knew what was going on and supported you, and I had...insomnia and bad grades!”

He moves his arm away without thinking about it and pain flashes through his system like a blaring alarm—his immediate reaction is to fold into himself, which only makes it _worse_ —Scott touches him and the pain disappears almost completely.

“I’m sorry,” Scott says quietly. “I was scared. When you were in hospital, I thought that you might not recover. It was easier not to tell you if it meant that,” he gestures at the room around them, “ _this_ wasn’t going to happen again.”

After a minute of consideration, he replies, “Okay.”

Scott smiles at him, still a little uncertain. “Okay?”

He leans back against the pillow, blinking heavy-lidded eyes and then closing them. Into the quiet busyness of a hospital ward at night—nurses walking quickly past the open door, machines beeping further down the hallway, repetitive enough to be calming—Scott’s cell phone vibrates with an incoming text.

Stiles is going to say something about restrictions on cell phones but sleep tugs at him, gentle and familiar, too difficult to resist.


	11. the happy ending

A succession of Serious Conversations has left him emotionally as well as physically drained. Derek seems to understand that because his visits are always quiet and calm. 

They watch TV on a low volume or more often not at all, just sitting in comfortable silence until Stiles inevitably falls asleep with Derek tracing soothing patterns against his skin. 

When they talk it’s about things like their experiences of Beacon Hills High School, before the Hale house fire and before the ‘accident’, when they both played for the lacrosse team and didn’t have much more to worry about than getting their homework handed in on time.

And Derek kisses him—lightly, barely there, against the back of his hand with their fingers still twisted together, holding eye contact and smiling when his heart beats faster—leaning over the bed to kiss his temple before leaving, pain fading at that brief contact—when Stiles is finally able to sit up without having to use a remote to alter the angle of the bed, closed-mouth against his lips, breath warm and eyes soft and _so close._

This visit to Beacon Hills has turned out nothing like what he had expected. Three weeks in, Stiles is finally discharged from hospital with strict instructions from Melissa about the _dos_ and _do-not-at-all-costs_ of having a still healing, tightly bandaged shoulder wound.

Vanessa has fired him twice since that night at the cemetery: the first time, he made the mistake of texting her about what had happened right after taking strong painkillers; then again when they were speaking over the phone while he was more coherent. 

(Her most recent email passed along a recipe for immune system boosting cupcakes from Alfarid and an emphatic reminder that the store gets busy around New Year, so Stiles figures that he has effectively been re-re-hired.)

His dad is shuffling papers at the station until the leg cast can be removed, carpooling with a deputy who lives nearby because he won’t be able to drive for the next few months.

There wasn’t any discussion about who would drive Stiles home from the hospital. He leans heavily against Derek once the elevator doors close, then he’s guided through the parking lot with an arm hovering near his waist, ready to support him at a second’s notice.

Stiles loses some time between the passenger seat of Derek’s Camaro and his living room, surrounded by more pillows than he realised that they even owned.

Though there is a movie playing on silent with subtitles on, Derek doesn’t pay it any attention. He’s sitting in the nearest armchair quietly turning the page of a book and glances up at the sound of—a change in Stiles’ breathing, his heart rate?

Now that Erica and Boyd are back in the physical world, their blessings have faded from the inside of his arm. That means no more super werewolf abilities.

Still, Stiles doesn’t need them to know that they’re about to have a Serious Conversation.

After struggling with the pillows for a moment, he gives up trying to have this conversation with any semblance of dignity. “Thank you,” he blurts out. “For everything. For saving my life after the accident or…whatever it really was. And for helping me through that panic attack at the hospital when I…” He swallows, unable to finish the sentence. “For being someone who Scott could share his secret with. And for-”

Derek leans forward in the armchair and says, quietly, “Stiles-”

“Just- Just let me finish this awkward monologue, okay? I want to say this at loud, at least once: thank you. For inviting me to the pack meeting instead of pushing me away. God, even for coming to the cemetery because it meant…it meant something, you know? That I knew about your latent impulse to howl at the moon and you knew that my hobby is doing favours for dead people. And even after you found out- Even after you called me a _necromancer_ —which, while technically accurate, is not a word that magic practitioners like to use in the 21st century—and were about to sic your pack of werewolves on me-”

“Stiles, I-”

“-even after that, thank you for staying with me at the hospital. Because…” His throat feels raw, dry, and he reaches for the glass of water that has been placed on the coffee table.

Derek takes the opportunity to speak. “You shouldn’t thank me, after what happened-”

“Hey, the awkward monologue is definitely not over yet,” Stiles warns him, putting a hand up to stop him from saying any more. “You had better brace yourself, because this is the really awkward part.” He takes a deep breath, which sends a shock of pain through his shoulder. 

“My memories from before the accident probably aren’t ever coming back,” he tells him. “I’ve always been pretty okay with that. I don’t even know what’s missing. If Lydia is right, and I gave up those memories so that I could have this magical ability… I would choose to keep the magic over getting those memories back. It’s important to me.”

And now they’re holding hands, Derek’s thumb stroking back and forth in soothing motions. He sighs as the sharp edge of pain in his shoulder becomes easier to ignore.

“What I’m trying to say is that I won’t ever remember how we _were._ If we argued all the time or I had a huge, embarrassing teenage crush on you—even how we met, the first time.

“What I remember is sitting across from you at the McCall’s dining table and thinking that you were probably the most interesting person I have ever met. And suggesting that we play twenty questions even though that’s not nearly enough to really get to know you. It’s only been a couple of weeks for me but I do. Derek, I really want to know you better. And that’s,” he touches the scar at the base of his skull self-consciously, “that’s all she wrote.”

Derek doesn’t respond immediately, raising an eyebrow after a few seconds of excruciating silence. Then he says, again, “Stiles.”

“Yes?” he asks nervously.

“I want to go on a date with you.”

In that moment, all Stiles seems capable of doing is blinking in surprise.

“Watching werewolf movies and ordering pizza doesn’t count.”

“Darn,” he jokes. “That was absolutely going to be my first suggestion.”

Derek rolls his eyes but the grip on his hand tightens, slightly.

He must have been asleep for a while, because the movie credits are rolling while the subtitle reads: [upbeat piano music]. Next to the glass of water there is a truly intimidating stack of medicine sheets—no doubt painkillers for when there isn’t a werewolf on standby. Lydia’s talisman brightens the room, sunflowers still as fresh as the day they were picked. 

_Vitality and happiness,_ he thinks to himself and smiles.

The magic is strong again in Beacon Hills. 

Now that his work is done, Stiles can rest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have an epilogue in the works but it is truly, shamefully sappy so ill have another look at it before posting
> 
> thanks for reading all the way to the end!


	12. epilogue: a grave mistake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> you dont need to read this. this is the 'happily ever after' that i wrote and then needed months to convince myself to upload. only proceed if you like those videos that play during the credits of cheesy romantic comedies.

“I might have fucked up,” he tells Scott over the phone. “Only, replace ‘might have’ with ‘definitely’ and ‘fucked up’ with ‘holy shit, Scott, I really and truly regret my decisions’.”

“That doesn’t make sense-”

“Hey, I didn’t call you for much deserved criticism, okay?” he says, slightly hysterically. “This is worse than that time I called you because a spirit had a crush on Derek and cursed me so that I wouldn’t be able to stand within five feet of him-”

“It’s probably not that bad-”

“-and _we had just started living together,_ Scott! It’s worse than that time!”

Scott sighs audibly before asking, “What happened?”

“Well, it’s our four year anniversary-”

“Congratulations.”

“Yeah, thanks. It’s our anniversary today and you know how we make a big deal about it. Last year _he took out a mortgage on a house_ and the year before that, I moved back to Beacon Hills. Every year it sort of…escalates, right? And it turns out there’s not much that you could give your boyfriend that’s as significant as _the deed to a house_ —except there totally is, and Derek thought of it because he’s a really great boyfriend-”

“What did he-”

“He proposed,” Stiles blurts out.

“Wow, really? Congratulations!”

“Hold up a second and picture this, okay? We’re having a romantic dinner at home. He cooked the food and I made dessert. It tastes great.” Derek’s cooking skills haven’t exactly improved in the past few years, but he does make a mean baked potato and they have a long-standing tradition of pretending anything else on the table was made in their kitchen and not, in fact, bought from one of the various restaurants in town.

“Candles-” Stiles flings his hand out, gesturing wildly, “-everywhere! We do a little bragging about how great our respective presents are. Then,” he pauses to take a deep breath, “Derek puts a small box on the table. And I think, ‘awesome, he must have fixed up the Jeep’-”

“I’m not hearing the part where you messed up, Stiles.”

For a second he doesn’t say anything. Then, “I thought that offering to séance his dead family members was a suitable fourth anniversary present and Derek might have possibly had an emotional breakdown? I’m not sure, because he locked the bedroom door.”

“Oh my god.”

“Yeah. I’m thinking that if this doesn’t lead to him immediately breaking up with me-” his heart beat stutters at the thought, “-I’ll run gift ideas past you or Kira in the future.” He presses his forehead against the bedroom door.

“Sounds like a good idea,” Scott agrees worriedly. Then he points out, “You realise that he can hear everything we’re saying, right?”

Stiles lowers the cell phone to say, louder, “I don’t have to séance anyone if you’re uncomfortable with it and I absolutely will marry you-”

“Whoa, hey-” comes Scott’s voice, muffled by the fabric of his shirt. It hides the thick network of scars on his shoulder, a reminder of everything that happened years ago.

“Every year I think that this has to be it, that this relationship can’t get any better-”

“Do I really need to hear this, Stiles?”

“But it does,” he murmurs, pressing his forehead against the door again. “Every year—no, _every single day,_ I look at you and I love you more-”

“I’ll talk to you later,” Scott says before hanging up.

“-more than I ever thought it was possible to love someone,” he continues more quietly, putting the cell phone into his pocket. Idly, he runs his fingertips over a rune that he had scratched into the wood and painted over, coiling lines that signify restful sleep without nightmares. “I’m sorry for bringing up some of your worst memories when we were in the middle of making a really, really good one.”

The lock clicks.

Hesitantly, he pushes the door open. “Derek?”

And there are familiar arms around him and the scent of Derek’s favourite cologne, only worn on special occasions.

And Derek pulls back far enough that they can look at each other, sharing each other’s breath for a suspenseful moment before he kisses him, heartbreakingly gentle and slow.

“You said you would marry me,” Derek reminds him, as if he would ever forget that surreal moment of opening the box and seeing a simple gold band, glinting in the candlelight.

“Yes,” he says and then they’re kissing again, harder this time.

Their foreheads are pressed together and Derek’s thumb strokes distractingly along the back of his neck. “You’re my family now,” he murmurs.

Stiles grins widely at him before he’s even really processed the words, so giddy with relief that this near-disastrous fourth anniversary won’t be their last that he’s trembling. “Yes,” he agrees and is prevented from saying anything more by a deep, lingering kiss. He gasps into it, pressing closer.

“You said yes,” says Derek, sounding raw and disbelieving.

“Was there another answer to that question? I’m pretty sure ‘yes’ was the right one.”

It turns out that they’re postponing the Serious ‘I Offered To Communicate With The Spirits Of Your Long Dead Relatives’ Conversation in favour of celebrating their engagement.

(Hopefully it will go like the ‘I Séanced My Mom And She Told Me That She Likes You’ Conversation that they had a couple of years ago.)

(So long as it goes better than the ‘I Wrote In My Will That I Don’t Want You To Contact Me Once I’m Dead’ Conversation, which resulted in a two month long separation during which Stiles is convinced that Derek subsisted on heartache and instant noodles alone.)

(They rarely talk about the ‘A Spirit Won’t Allow Me Near You Until You Take Her On A Date’ Conversation, which is the reason why their front door is slightly off-angle.)

No matter what, their lives are still full of potential: for difficult conversations, romantic dinners, poorly-made talismans (which Derek keeps finding and throwing away), the occasional blessing or curse gone awry, and _so many_ well-intentioned mistakes. 

The indefinable force that was [x] never comes back to Beacon Hills. It doesn’t need to.


End file.
